Title: Gay trippers. Source: Village Voice,
10/21/97, Vol. 42 Issue 42, p85, 4/5p, 2bw Author(s): Hoberman,
J.
The old Hong Kong is no more, but, after a half-dozen years as a
legend of the Chinatown/midnight/festival circuit, hyperromantic HK action
aesthete Wong Kar-Wai is edging toward mainstream consciousness. His last two
features--the garish and melancholy Fallen Angels and its relatively subdued
follow-up Happy Together--were featured in the 1997 New York Film Festival and
both are scheduled for commercial release.
Happy Together, currently at
Cinema Village, is both a bravura love story and an attitudinous buddy film.
Acerbic, moody, and provocatively slight, it's a movie of apparent non sequiturs
and privileged moments. Daring himself to miss the Crown Colony's last days,
Wong went on location to Argentina and, together with his longtime
cinematographer Chris Doyle, reimagined Buenos Aires as something like the
Chinese equivalent of 1920s expatriate Paris--with outermost Patagonia standing
in for the edge of the world.
Set mainly in a nocturnal city of vague
specifics and visceral details, Happy Together posits a love affair between two
major Hong Kong stars, Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, both reborn from Wong's
Ashes of Time. There's no particular explanation for how the guys wound up
stranded in Buenos Aires; suffice to say they're a long way from home. Where
Leung (last seen here as the poet-pimp in Cyclo) is serious, introverted, and
responsible, baby-faced Cheung (most recently Gong Li's gigolo nemesis in
Temptress Moon) plays his spontaneously heedless opposite.
Wong needs
only one or two setups to get sex out of the way--catching the stars' lovemaking
as it is reflected in the dirty mirror of a seedy hotel room--before settling
down for a voluptuous immersion in the couple's emotional detritus. A shocker by
HK standards, Happy Together makes explicit the homoerotic content of the
male-bonding bloodbaths that have characterized the postJohn Woo Hong Kong
action film. (On the other hand, in Cannes, where Happy Together won Wong a
prize for best direction, the movie was given the politically suggestive
subtitle A Story About a Reunion.)
After their breakup (for no real
reason) en route to the fabulous Iguazu Falls--the film's equivalent of the Holy
Grail--Leung finds work in Buenos Aires steering tourists to a tango bar while
Cheung drifts into hustling. They patch things up (unhappy together) while
Cheung recovers from some trick-inflicted injuries and Leung washes dishes in a
Chinese restaurant. Leung is initially unwilling to start over but his attempt
to hold Cheung backfires. The two split once more, for a prolonged period of
loneliness--complete with a frenetic cruising sequence shot verite-style from a
moving car. Working nights in an abattoir, Leung haunts public toilets and porn
theaters as the urban nocturne yields a quick flash of the Hong Kong skyline,
filmed upside down on the other side of the globe.
A long, jagged still
life, replete with landscape and documentaryinserts, Happy Together swoons in
and out of scorched color. The movie was shot, as Wong tends to work, off the
cuff. Albeit less densely edited than Fallen Angels, Happy Together has the
narrative fragmentation of early Godard. (The lengthy scene in which Leung cares
for Cheung in his impossibly narrow digs all but quotes the epic room service
that took up perhaps a quarter of Breathless.) Just as Wong's new wave sword
flick Ashes of Time was more extravagantly mournful than violent, so Happy
Together saves most of its passion for regret. As the solitary Leung finally
contemplates Iguazu Falls, the same mist that sprays his face clouds Cheung's
eyes back in Buenos Aires.
Wong's romanticism has always drawn
sustenance from rock 'n' roll. While offering ample Astor Piazzolla (and even
some Frank Zappa), Happy Together sets its last pixilated cityscape to the
eponymous Turtles anthem; it's less a distended rock video than the
feature-length prolegomenon to a pop song. If this is the most cosmopolitan of
Wong's films, it is also the most provincial. The movie goes around the world to
find the perfect look-back vantage point. In the end, homesick Leung arrives in
Taiwan just in time to catch the televised news of Deng Xiaoping's death. Loss
mixes with relief. It's the cosmonaut's return. Leung boards a driverless train
on the notorious new Taipei subway. China rules...in more ways than one.