It took six films for Wong Kar-wai to drop us in the middle of an ongoing relationship (rather than focus on characters who are longing for one), but that doesn’t mean the people we meet are any happier.
Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) have traveled from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires to see the Iguazu Falls, but their tempestuous romance hits a rocky patch (one in a string of many, we’re meant to understand) before they reach their destination. Instead, Happy Together charts the rancorous ups and downs of their relationship as they bounce among jobs and apartments in the city, separating on occasion but never quite leaving (or being allowed to leave) each other’s orbit.
Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette). At least twice, the film cuts away to an overhead shot of the waterfalls themselves, a nearly impressionistic image of blues and greens and grays and browns (with small black dots that must be birds). The shot seems to come from another universe; despite the raw power on display, it conveys peace, beauty, and stillness—all things the central relationship is missing.
Indeed, Po-wing counts as another one of Wong’s emotionally abusive men (Cheung actually played one before, in Days of Being Wild). Impulsive and callous, Po-wing keeps the sad, lonely Yiu-fai on a string, always offering, when things have gone too far, “Let’s start over.” Leung, another Wong vet (Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express), hits new levels of melancholy as a man forced to choose between a heartless lover and loneliness in an unknown country. (The use of slow, lingering tango music by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla only accentuates the sense of alienation.)
Even when a third option appears, the damaged Yiu-fai cannot bring himself to pursue it. Working at a restaurant, he meets a dishwasher named Chang (Chen Chang); their friendship deepens, dancing delicately at the edges of something more. Eventually Chang embarks on his own adventure—to see the southernmost tip of Argentina—and asks Yiu-fai to leave a voice message on a portable tape recorder as a way to remember him. I won’t spoil what the message is, but will describe what we see: in an unadorned medium shot, Yiu-fai sits alone at a table in a restaurant, the recorder against his face as barely noticeable tears well up in his eyes. It’s relatively restrained, for Wong, yet perhaps the most heartbreaking moment in all of his heartbreak cinema.