Wong Kar-Wai is in the middle of one of the most exciting periods of sustained brilliance in some time. Although it would be sheer hyprbole and, frankly, totally out of order to compare it to Godard in the 60's I'm sure it won't be long before someone does. It was a relief to have Happy Together land in the Ottawa region, particularly after being denied the inestimable treat that is Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-Wai's fourth film that never made it here). The film has no doubt benefitted from the 'Best Direction' accolade it earned at Cannes last year. Although, praised or not, there is really no need to look for an excuse to show Wong's films. He is one of the most unique filmmakers practicing today and has shown the ability and willingness to transcend and challenge past triumphs. It would be easy to imagine an interminable series of variations on Chungking Express's style and technique but instead the director has treated it as one step in his filmmaking. Some will argue that Fallen Angels disproves this, and they may be right (though I would beg to differ) but the fact remains that taken as a whole the filmmaker's canon (Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time) is void of redundancy.
The film chronicles the trials and tribulations of a gay man whos trip to Argentina with his partner has not turned out as planned. The film is about their relationship: jealousy, ambiguity, hypocrisy and sincerity. It is about travel: spontanaeity, discovery, adventure and the unexpected. It is about Hong-Kong: It's limitlessness, isolation and ambivalence. And it is about a million other things that I surly missed altogether.
This is only the most superficial layer of the film. It is cursory, maybe even unimportant since Wong's and DOP Christopher Doyle's off-balance style take center stage. Although the events and situations in Wong's films are never banal or uninteresting the real strength of the filmmaker is his abiltiy to appropriately employ every facet of the medium. The photography in this film consists of murky gray-scale scenes or sepia tinted, washed out colour. The colour is controlled quite carefully with the sepia occasionally being replaced by more natural skin tones as to create certain associations between the state of the relationships shown. One effect of this cinematography is a bewildering number of allusions emerging. The use of sound in the film is equally complex: Wong has a predilection for voiceover which is a device that can easily get annoying. It was used expertly in Chungking. It's use in Happy Together, however, is comparatively spare. The relative futility of spoken words is alluded to by the repeated references to nature (the waterfall) and in the bar scene in which Liu is asked to leave a message on a tape recorder and can only muster sobs. In this way the confusion and difficulty of expression that the protagonists seem to experience is mirrored by the film's technique. This provides a very distinct tone compared to the dismayed though rarely verbally challenged characters of Chungking Express.
The narrative technique used can best be descrtibed as non-continuous. It contains fragments, repetitions isolated musings and coincidences. The film ends up feeling like a rough copy, however, further inspection betrays this first impression. I am not sure why but an event that should be little more than an awkward sledgehammer beating of a point to death such as the Taiwanese friend's trip to the 'bottom of the world' seems eleagant in Wong's hands. Scenes that could deceptively be passed off as filler like the repeated soccer games with the many bumps, touches and glances that Liu throws his Taiwanese friend speak volumes. And cruel coincidence that could feel totally contrived such as the bathroom scene in which Liu resorts to acts he has condemned earlier in the film feel absolutely perfect. Perhaps it is because Wong places his emphasis in the right places. There is no long deliberate scripting process (thought to be essential for a well planned relatively low budget shoot) instead his last three films were largely based on notes and sketches made on the day of shooting. The result is a very specific spontanaeity to the films. There are no heavy handed compositions or forced symmetries. Instead the films seem to be the result of intuitively collecting the right material and then rigorously editing it together. I have already heaped enough praise on the results that these methods yield.
When so much cinema seems to be at pains to push the limits of content: more violence, more nudity, more shock therapy Wong Kar-wai seems much more interested in pushing the limits of how things are said and told as opposed to what is told. On this basis, Happy Together seems linked to Sokurov's Mother and Son. The two films are negatives of each other that on first glance could not be more different. Both films however, render wholly new methods of expression positioning themselves well ahead of their peers and their time. -- -Omar Odeh http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/3920
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