Happy Together
by Wong Kar-Wai
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DVD details
Actor: Chang Chen, Chang Cheng, Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-WaiDirector: Wong Kar-Wai
Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle
Editor: William Chang
Editor: Wong Ming-lam
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Cantonese (Original Language); English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 97 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Kino Video
DVD Reviews of Happy Together
DVD Review: Loneliness and Alienation
Summary: 5 Stars
"Happy Together"
Loneliness and Alienation
Amos Lassen
Two young Asians, Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong and start their holiday. However, something happens and their relationship turns sour. Yiu-Fai decides that he should return home and starts working in a tango bar so that he can buy a plane ticket. Suddenly Po-Wing appears and he is bruised and beaten. Even though Yiu-Fai shows empathy, he cannot enter into a romantic relationship with his friend. Po-Wing, unlike his friend, is not ready to settle down. After changing jobs, Yiu-Fai meets a young guy from Taiwan, Chang and his life changes again while Po-Wing is shattered.
Kar Wai Wong directed this little gem of a film about the nature of loneliness. It is a non-linear film that shows the truth about modern relationships. Here is a story about emotion and love and it challenges the title it was given. It is about those difficulties that surround a relationship on the skids. Alienation both within and outside of the relationship is what dooms it. In the beginning we see that the two young men cannot find equality or balance together and this leads them to despair. When Po-Wing had been ill and had to be cared for, their relationship thrived but as his health improved, Fai drew away from him and refused any attempt at intimacy. Now that Wing was well enough to do for himself, the balance of power between them shifted, Po-Wing slowly slips away from the guy he loved and entered the world of street hustling.
Each of the men are devastated by the loss of love. We sense the alienation between them as well as the alienation they feel in society. I am not sure that this is necessarily a gay film--the lead characters just happen to be gay but this is a story that can apply to anyone--loneliness is universal as is the melancholia that comes with it.
The actors are wonderful in their roles and we feel what they feel--making this not an easy film to watch. The film is basically a look at a couple falling in and out of love--their sexual identification does not matter. They guys are lost souls who are lonely and longing and lovelorn. Their escape to Argentina proves to be their undoing but it would have happened anywhere. Argentina physically represents their relationship--claustrophobic and oppressive, something that might have been beautiful yet becomes a symbol of escape.
What really makes this film so absorbing is the emotional authenticity. The director aimed at the heart and he hit his target.
DVD Review: never happy, never together
Summary: 5 Stars
if there's ever been a better work of art - movie, novel, opera, video game - about what it's like to be lonely and in love and out of place all at the same time, i'd like to know about it. If there's ever been a film made in color where the cinematography does a better job of telling the story, i'd like to know about it. beautiful, sad, tawdry, exciting, and very very moving. It almost seems incidental, or obvious, or distracting, to add that it's the best gay film ever made. DVD Review: Bittersweet Love Story Applies to Everyone
Summary: 5 Stars
I am a new fan of director Wong Kar-Wai movies. Happy Together is one of my favorites. When I watched the movie for the first time, I did so with no prior knowledge of the film other than it was a love story between two men. If you're over 30, you have probably lived this story. You may have been Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung) or you may have been Lai Yiu Fai (Tony Leung), but you have undoubtedly been involved in a romance much like the one portrayed in this movie.
Happy Together has nothing to do with being gay. It has everything to do with love, loss, regret and emotional growth. I saw myself in both Po Wing's character and Yiu Fai's character. In many ways, I felt my life was being shown in this movie. I have loved men who hurt me and emotionally abused me, but I couldn't say no when asked to "start again." Conversely, I have callously mistreated some very nice guys just because it was so easy to do it. And, just like Po Wing, I cried with regret when I realized what I had thrown away.
You can read a lot of deep meaning into this movie, but ultimately it is a love story which is all too familiar to the majority of us. If it is hard to watch, it is because we see ourselves in the characters onscreen. It shouldn't be because the characters are two men. Love is love.
Leslie Cheung is both hateful and sympathetic. He is mesmermizing onscreen. Tony Leung is, for the most part, very convincing as Po Wing's long-suffering lover, although I did feel Leung was somewhat uncomfortable in some of his scenes. Still, it didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of the film. My favorite scene in the movie is a flashback of Po Wing and Yiu Fai dancing in the kitchen. It isn't erotic. They are simply holding each other and moving to the music. I felt it conveyed their love for each other more than any other moment in the movie.
Although this movie can be enjoyed on many levels, I choose to view it as a love story that each of us has experienced some time in our life. It is bittersweet realism.
DVD Review: Unpractised, Imaginary Tango
Summary: 4 Stars
I just saw this film for the third time, and have completely revised my perspective of how I see this; a completely invigorating experience, and so much that I was forced to write about it here and now.
Much of the criticism toward this film is that it is aimless and pondering, and even with the visual glory and elegance, remains distant and without a real center. I've seen this twice before tonight, and have been practically frustrated with exact the same reasons - I've had a Ho Po-wing/Lai Yiu-fai relationship with this film, every time willing start again just because I hope to find out that value that I, for my own sake, hope is there. Just returned from the cinema, and I think I've finally found it.
My problem with the aimlessness exists because Wong usually, even when he impressionistically improvises and creates the mood of the film as he goes along, does invent coherent and well-focused visual narratives: "In the Mood for Love" is gloriously tight-focused, the visual tone poem weaving out a cyclical narrative, reaching its peak in "2046". I know the logical predecessor is a wholly different film altogether, but I place this as the apprentice film in relation to "Mood", in much the same way as we tend to see "Kagemusha" to "Ran". Even more appropriate would be "Chungking" to "Ashes of Time" (which is even referred to in dialogue). Here the focus is simply all over the place, and the visual flair anticipates much of what was to become the epitome of romance and love depicted in cinematic terms three years later. But it is exactly this factor that opened a new door for me.
The words you hear time and again, "I think we should start all over again", is a step in appreciating the whole narrative construction: when the two men break up and start again, we literally start again by being put to the beginning of a long visual phrase, each time with slight variation: it's like being treated the same short story all over again, with slightly different dynamics and focus. And if you look beneath the surface, you can see the personal dynamics shifting, roles changing: Lai becomes Ho eventually, followed by the narcism yet also with determined self-consciousness, and the other way around. Watch how the dynamics start going backwards when Lai and his pals are playing football and he is smoking a cigarette to the music of Frank Zappa, and recall a counterpart for it in the scene where Ho is sitting in the taxi and smoking a cigarette to the same song. I think that the ambivalence of the sex scenes underlines this point. Wong even has, in the very beginning, our eye moving from a brief glimpse of Lai's passport, the introduction of his identity, to what? The two have sex, and you can draw all sorts of psychological connections at your will.
And then there is all that is visual. I mentioned that I have been troubled by this film because the visual perspectives (different styles, uses of colour) hardly seem to mesh as you would expect if you come from "Days of Being Wild" or "In The Mood For Love" - even the exuberant "Fallen Angels". Instead of introspection as in the "Mood", we have a vision that explodes to all directions at once; we have the repetitive element here as well, but instead of going inward, giving focus, it goes even further in visual distance. But what I at long last understood tonight is that it is not a flaw: instead it is a conscious effort to find circumference, not in trying to control but to channel energy; there is a different set of dynamics at work here: just compare how Wong shoots the couple in the backseat of the cab here and three years later; the context is almost identical, yet our eye keeps its distance. The contrast is even more striking when here we have an explicit presence of sex and lust as what in a Freudian way shapes the personalities of our main characters, but also that of the camera, and in "Mood" we have no sexual reference at all between our main characters. Enriches both films, I think.
Wong is ingenius in creating a rhythmic flow, and here his use of Piazzolla, the most erotically vibrant tangos I know, not only adds to the subcontext, it annotates the head structure: just think of this film as the two men practising tango, each time having to start over: this film as seen from the slopes of Iguazu Falls; this film as a remembrance whispered to a tape recorder, being played in the Lighthouse Island, remembering the past in the place where you become one with it; letting go of the past, not by evading but by greeting it. Just as Wong has said about this film in an interview (found on the Asia Studios website): "...to me, happy together can apply to two persons or apply to a person and his past, and I think sometimes when a person is at peace with himself and his past, I think it is the beginning of a relationship which can be happy, and also he can be more open to more possibilities in the future with other people."
Completely worth every second of it.
With best regards,
Antti
DVD Review: Great movie, but it's cut
Summary: 4 Stars
For me personally "Happy Together" is one of the best asian and one of the best lovemovies ever made. Sure, if you don't like or hate gay people, this is not your movie....I am not homosexual, but the way Wong-Kar Wai shows the relationship between these two guys, is very intimate and i think, it has something for gay and not-gay people.
The sad thing is, there is over one minute missing in the US-DVD! I own the HK-DVD and there you can see a really cool black and white scene with the two fantastic tango-dancers and also a scene, where Tony Leung buys something to drink+eat...whatever. It may sound not so special, but i think it's always bad, when there's something cut. That's why i give this DVD "only" 4 stars. By the way, the picture and the sound quality are really good.
Description of Happy Together
This chronicles the stormy affair of a gay couple living as expatriates in buenos aires. Studio: Kino International Release Date: 10/19/2004 Starring: Tony Leung Leslie Cheung Run time: 98 minutesGeneral DVDs
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