All Wong Kar-wai’s films are imbued with a predictable longing that permeates like humidity over a city, unwanted, sticky, irresistible as twin magnetic fields. How many times can two people start over until the lines between begginings and ends are blurrier than sand on an ocean floor?
Happy Together is intrigued in this paradox and push and pull, even more so than in 1995’s Fallen Angels. Still, it is as much a tragedy as it is a miracle that that it is our folly for one another that keeps us all alive. It’s such a rare, almost indescribable magic to witness, the kind rarely captured by any other kind of filmmaker.
Theres more blue sky in this film, but make no mistake: it’s just as dark and fluorescent and full of yearning as the rest of them. In a way, it’s Wong Kar-wai’s most complete, only a few years before In The Mood For Love came along and eventually grew into his magnum opus. Much of Wong Kar-wai’s past work centers on tension, but Happy Together is more interested in the aftermath of realizing all that restrained tension, the fallback into the comforting knowledge of an old lover who’s your own brand on gin and tonic.
When we are alone, often memory is the only thing to fill the empty spaces. And yet it is also memory that begets regret, that draws longing from the well of our solitary souls. We reach for whatever we can to satiate that longing, no matter the consequences. It is the eternal tragedy of humanity. Inever want to fall out of love, not if it’s the kind from Wong Kar-wai’s films, no matter what it does to me. Not when it feels so dizzyingly alive.
