| Overview: | After "Fallen Angels" and "Chungking Express," cult Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai demonstrates that his stylized alternative sensibility has remained unsullied by international acclaim. "Happy Together," shot by the uncompromising Christopher Doyle, is a patchwork of videotape, filtered 16-mm images, slow-motion shots, colorized sequences and just about anything else that editor Willaim Chang Suk-Ping can stitch together--happily together--into a 93-minute-long downtown curio.
Director Kar-Wai's screenplay, more notable for its muteness than its rigorously mundane dialogue, has us follow the non-adventures of a gay Hong Kong couple as their relationship breaks up in distant Argentina. After a de rigueur sex scene to open the film, we see the sensible Lai Yiu-Fai and the flighty Ho Po-Wing go their separate ways on the shoulder of a blindingly white Patagonian expressway, then meet up again in the mean streets of Buenos Aires.
The story is a succession of gay nay-saying, as the whorish Ho keeps getting rebuffed by the deeply hurt Lai, who holds down jobs as a bouncer at a tango club and a butcher at an abattoir. The ex-couple live together, unhappily, until Ho eventually goes back out onto the streets to certain self-destruction. Lai, who's made friends with a goofy Taiwanese drifter en route to the tip of South America, eventually earns enough money to hop a plane home to Asia.
As the suffering Lai, accomplished actor Tony Leung turns in a stellar performance, despite the constraints imposed by the intrusive visual monkey-business. His silences express emotional pain, even through blue filters and under naked lightbulbs. Less successful is Leslie Chang's Ho, who seems unworthy of Lai's slavish affection. But perhaps that is Wong Kar-Wai's distressingly trite point: we can't choose whom we love, we can only try to limit the damage that love causes. If that is the case, then audiences should look at this uneven film as a skylight over the Hong Kong underground rather than as a window into the human soul.
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