Happy Together (1997)

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I want to preface this by saying I suspect this is a better film than my rating suggests. The problem is almost certainly me. Before this, my Wong Kar-wai experience amounts to two films: In the Mood for Love, which is a stone-cold masterpiece, and Chungking Express, which I’ve only seen once and never quite found my way into. Unfortunately, this landed closer to the latter - I could admire it without fully connecting to it in the way it seems to demand. The story follows Lai and Ho (Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung), two gay Hong Kong men trapped in a turbulent, codependent relationship who travel to Buenos Aires, where their romance unravels into exhausting cycles of separation and reunion. And that’s really it. Lai is the more grounded of the two; Ho is a wild card, prone to emotional outbursts and reckless behavior that eventually leaves him badly injured. The frenetic editing and fractured structure effectively mirrors the dysfunction of the relationship - you feel how broken these two are together. But that same instability also drains some of the emotional bond out of it. We never see how they fell in love, only the wreckage of it, which makes it difficult to fully invest in what’s being lost. What the film does beautifully, though, is articulate what love actually is once the butterflies have gone. It’s work. It’s the difference between yearning for a feeling and yearning for a person. Like the waterfall metaphor that runs through the film, those feelings can be enormously destructive - but in the end they dissipate into mist, rising away until there’s nothing left. It doesn’t matter whether you were the emotional one or the steady one, the deceiver or the deceived. When a relationship dies, what remains is loneliness. And, as the film quietly insists, lonely people are all the same. That’s a profound idea, elegantly expressed. I just wish I’d felt it more than I understood it.

3 out of 5 Stars