Even Iguazú Falls – the massive waterfall formation spanning 2,700 metres across the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, which Lai and Ho get lost trying to find – are captured by Wong using tight, claustrophobic aerial shots that unmoor the falls from the landscape they abut, so that Earth’s gushing maw appears as a distant, misty abstraction caught in an eternal lockstep. We see the spit with which Lai greases Ho’s ass before topping him, their brimming ashtrays and the dense gossamer of smoke that hangs in their seedy, flea-ridden boarding room. The film opens on a few close-up shots of Lai and Ho’s passports, stamped ‘15 April 1995’, and our attention is immediately swivelled over the components of their dinky bedroom so that, in less than five minutes, it is clear the couple is reconciling after a breakup. As the poet John Yau observes on the Poetry Foundation website, in Happy Together, Wong ‘never pulls the camera back from Buenos Aires You see everything up close, and he won’t let you step back or out of the film,’ which moves fitfully from scene to scene at a rapid pace. ‘I couldn’t make a film in Hong Kong in 1997,’ he recounts in Kwan Pun-Leung and Amos Lee’s exceptional documentary Buenos Aires Zero Degree (1999), ‘so I a film avoiding Hong Kong.’ But Happy Together itself is anything but avoidant. In Happy Together, however, Wong eschews depicting Hong Kong altogether. In the films he made prior to Happy Together – like the shimmering crime flicks As Tears Go By (1988) and Fallen Angels (1995), or the double-edged confection Chungking Express (1994) – loosely knit ensembles of young, lovesick characters buzz across a neon Hong Kong, transforming the island-city, as Stephen Teo writes in Wong Kar-Wai: Auteur of Time (2019), into a place of ‘eternal sadness’.
The looming threat of this geopolitical repositioning – the ‘one country, two systems’ framework meant to give Hong Kong a ‘high degree of autonomy’ from Beijing – is a central preoccupation of Wong’s, and appears across his entire oeuvre. This was just six weeks before the UK formally handed over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), effectively ending British colonial rule. It’s been 25 years since Wong’s film, originally slated as The Buenos Aires Affair, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where Wong won Best Director and was catapulted to international prominence. In sleep, they briefly enjoy the combined physical proximity and unconscious distance that, in waking life, they cannot recognise. The moments are infrequent, as if sleep – memory’s great consolidator, or the other petit mort – were the only constant against which to accurately measure the vicissitudes of their waning love. The two counterpunching lovers in Wong Kar-Wai’s beloved gay downer Happy Together (1997) – Lai Yiu-Fai (played by Wong-regular Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Ho Po-Wing (played by the late Cantopop chanteur and film star Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing) – appear happiest when one or the other is sleeping.
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