The Advocate, Nov 11, 1997 n746 p67(2). Title:
Happy Together._(movie reviews) Author: Jan Stuart
If Vito Russo were
around to update his landmark study The Celluloid Closet, he might note with a
sigh of satisfaction that queer cinema came of age in the 1990s -- and emerged
tough as nails.
The maverick filmmakers of today's gay-indie scene are,
by and large, out, comfortable in their skin, and indifferent to any PC
imperatives. Films such as Todd Haynes's Poison, Gregg Araki's The Living End,
and Ira Sachs's The Delta bask in their own insolence, with protagonists who
risk being resistible, if not downright repellent, stylistic hocuspocus that
holds the viewer at arm's length. They look terrific, but they're not looking to
make friends.
Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together is a classic
example. It is the story of two lovers m a foreign land who are trying to repair
a broken relationship. It is all but bereft of happiness. The quality of
togetherness that we observe is enough to make a wounded heart give up on love
altogether. The first time I saw it, I couldn't wait for it to end. The second
time, I couldn't peel my eyes off it.
The gulf of dysfunction dividing
Lai and Ho can be measured from the opening scene, a bout of lovemaking that
teeters uncomfortably close to rape. The embattled boyfriends (played with naked
ferocity by Hong Kong matinee idol Tony Leung [Leung Chiu-Wai] and Farewell My
Concubine's Leslie Cheung [Cheung Kwok-Wing]) have gone to Argentina to start
over at Iguazu Falls, a romantic lost horizon that, like their hoped-for
reconciliation, will remain forever out of reach.
En route to the falls,
they fight and split. With their travel budget shot, Ho makes a killing in
Buenos Aires as a hustler while Lai struggles along in a series of occupations
that each carry subtle metaphoric resonance for his situation (tango-bar
doorman, chef, and meat packer). Ho; goes running back to Lai after being beaten
up by a john, and as his wounds mend the pair renew their Strindbergian rites of
mental abuse. When Lai confesses in retrospect that this was the happiest time
they would spend together, you don't know whether to weep for them or throw your
popcorn, cup at the screen.
Superficially, Wong's Happy Together is a
horse of a far different and darker color than his Chungking Express, a giddily
eccentric (and resolutely heterosexual) romantic caper. What they share on
deeper inspection is a remorse for the stubborn elusiveness of love -- gay or
straight -- and a sensitivity to the solitude of the exile. Just when the film
and its audience are about to implode from Ho and Lai's punishing tango, Wong
leavens the drama with a delightful dishwasher from Taipei named Chang (Chang
Chen), whom Lai befriends during his kitchen stint. Fresh, adorable, and
sexually unformed, Chang impresses upon Lai the possibility of seeing through
listening as well as the repleneshing power of camaraderies forged by strangers
at sea in a strange land.
Wong (named Best Director at the 1997 Cannes
Film Festival for this film) achieves an empathy for that alien experience
through a rush of abrupt, unfinished scenes that have the jagged fascination of
broken mirror pieces. Wong has cool taste in music, and the film's abrasive
edges are smoothed over by a haunting score that cannily employs Astor
Piazzolla's "Tango Apasionado," two compositions by Frank Zappa, and an aching
vocal by South American crooner Caetano Veloso. The film's greatest asset is the
dazzling palette of Australian cinematographer Chris Doyle, whose alternation of
black and white with blue and orange filters drapes the lovers in a ravishing
gauze of melancholy. Doyle's slow-motion and stop-camera effects make the
lighting of a boyfriend's cigarette or a farewell handshake between chums more
intensely erotic than the brusque act of penetration that sets Happy Together
off on its sad, sad course.