A couple take a trip to Argentina but both men find their lives drifting apart in opposite directions.
EN
“Happy Together – elliptical, compelling, constantly on the edge of falling apart into mere bits and pieces – has a style and texture to match its poignant themes. The Wong-Doyle bag of tricks is inexhaustibly rich: space is warped and fragmented, colours are altered, familiar tourist-spots suddenly seem like strange, surreal haunts. Overlaying it all is a lush musical collage of tango tracks and pop tunes that captures precisely the tearing mix of irony, longing and ephemeral ecstasy which makes Wong so unique and precious in the contemporary world cinema scene.”
Adrian Martin1
Han Ong: When you say an MTV “form,” do you mean the quick cuts?
Wong Kar-Wai: Yeah, it’s more fragmented. Most of the filmmaking in Hong Kong, even now, is very lyrical, very smooth, and always very traditional. Of course MTV has become something very formulaic, but in the late eighties, when it was first shown in Hong Kong, we were all really impressed with the energy and the fragmented structure. It seemed like we should go in this direction. About the step-printing process, in effect it’s an answer to John Woo’s use of slow motion. We did it in reverse and shot with a faster speed, which turned out to be something like step-printing.
[...]
Why Buenos Aires?
I didn’t want to make a film about Hong Kong in 1997. After we made the film, we knew that it was not about Buenos Aires, but was somehow more related to Hong Kong. So instead of calling it “Buenos Aires Affair,” which was its working title and would have been very exotic but misleading, we called it Happy Together. Maybe you think that is kind of cynical. . .
No. I didn’t respond to it as cynical at all; to me it was what they could have been but weren’t. By the end, the film achieves a great melancholy power. It’s also about the pop world of love, ships passing in the night, and the wonderfully lush moments, this time transposed to a different country and a homosexual context.
To me, Happy Together applies not only to the relationship between two persons, but also the relationship between one person and his past. If people are at peace with themselves and their past, this is the start of being able to be happy with somebody else.
Han Ong in conversation with Wong Kar-Wai2
- 1Adrian Martin, “Happy Together,” Film Critic: Adrian Martin, November 1998.
- 2Han Ong, “Wong Kar-wai by Han Ong,” BOMB Magazine, 1 January 1998.
