ART OF EUROPE

Wong Kar Wai - Happy Together (1997)

[happy together] The title is a paradox, not in itself but when applied to the film. The characters are not depicted as happy, nor are they necessarily together. Wong described them as being "like a plane and an airport." The notion of Wordsworth's "Which having been must ever be" perhaps reconciles the two, allowing a final togetherness through memorialization. As Wong puts it "happy together can apply to two persons or a person and his past." The past is potentially more vast, and in its vastness more endearing, as represented by the waterfall and the cape. The waterfall comes to represent the harmony Fai (Tony Leung) and Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) strive for with their multiple fresh starts, but somehow manage to never achieve. The narrative of the movie (after a brief voice over briefing) opens with the two men driving to see the falls in person, together, until the combination of growing first lost then stranded forces them to turn around and head back to Buenos Aries. A memento, a lamp depicting in-miniature (contrasting sharply with the massive, recurring aerial shot) the falls, is kept in their apartment. By the end, they have grown apart, for good, and Fai alone makes it to the waterfall, wishing he had somewhere to share it with. Chang (Chang Chen) undergoes a similar pilgrimage, to the so-called "end of the world," to play a dictaphone recording of Fai's "sadness," something he'd expected to be verbal, but which is ultimately only a faint, sob-like muttering (the lack of verbal record being the lack of a true emotional covenant between Fai and Chang). Both scenes are monuments of natural beauty, both locales are extreme in nature (the high falls, the "end of the world"). The attention to geographic qualities sharpens the sense of separation at the film's close, when Fai has stopped in Taipei (a last stop before his return to Hong Kong), leaving both Po-Wing and Chang in what is perhaps (from Hong Kong) the most distant region of the world. But the motif of memorialization works even now: Fai visits Chang's family in Taipei; he takes a picture of Fai with him when he leaves. The peace Fai has made with himself, and the world (as evidenced by his readiness and ability to return home) offers a more concrete, hence more stable, memorialization than Po-Wing receives, with the montaged "hallucination" (the cut-in of Leung for the man he'd previously been dancing with) in the tango club. Fai has made it to the falls, though he made it alone, and can move on to return to what he once was, when he was complete and inalien.

buenos aires zero degree (which i can't seem to find in the imdb) is mostly just out takes of the scenes involving women e.g. shirley kwan who were later deemed to be, well, women.

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