Critics reviews

One cannot help but lament the ruinous cage of romance and delusion these two hopeless romantics are constricted in as they get caught in the familiar Wong Kar-wai tropes of claustrophobic desire, violent longing, apathetic loneliness and masochistic passion, hoping to salvage a relationship that has shambled beyond measure.

Shot with the melancholy greens and woozy ethereality of Wong’s emotional landscape, Happy Together deceptively mines the joys of moving on in a gradual unburdening that spells the end of loneliness.

In Happy Together, it feels almost irrelevant that Ho and Lai live at the fringes of mainstream society, because between them they have created their own world; they don’t need to prove that they belong anywhere but with each other.

The mesmerizing visuals that Christopher Doyle created for that film (and would carry into Wong Kar-Wai’s future works) make us feel as if the characters are floating through the city, incapable of affixing themselves to it.

Happy Together is a volatile drama of perpetual stylistic unrest, subjecting its audience to a barrage of vibrant, restless imagery cut into jagged, disorienting fragments.

Wong Kar-Wai and cameraman Chris Doyle have crafted their most lyrical film.

Within the grimy confines of Lai's apartment, old wounds fester and eventually explode, with the interpersonal shrapnel bouncing off the walls and slicing right back into the two men's minds and hearts. Doyle's captures this claustrophobia with stunningly lithe and intimate camerawork, oscillating between evocative depth compositions and squirm-inducing close-ups of Lai and Ho as they scream and seethe.

HAPPY TOGETHER is more promiscuous, sexually and formally. A bold reconfiguring of Hong Kong's most popular straight actors as an quarrelsome expat gay couple, HAPPY TOGETHER scrambles desire into a series of conditional repetitions. Literally, it's all about breaking up. It also concludes with the most ecstatic use of the title tune imaginable.

Happy Together unfolds as if it were a recollection of a particularly intense period in its central character’s life, much like Wong’s subsequent tale of unrequited passion, In The Mood For Love. Yet Happy Together is more bitter than sweet, because whatever moments of joy and contentment its on-again/off-again lovers experience are answered tenfold by suffocating co-dependency, betrayal, and heartache.

Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film is a mass of contradictions. It’s a movie mostly sour on love but filmed as though filtered through the vehement rush of a newfound romanticism. It’s both fragmented and cyclical. It’s stiflingly claustrophobic and also brashly international. And it’s an intimate, interpersonal look at the forces that keep two men simultaneously joined and repelled like whirring magnets...

During moments like Tony Leung’s fast-motion elevated train ride through the glittering Taipei night at the end of Happy Together, questions of representation drop away and film viewing gives way to pure ecstasy. Like Tarantino and Wenders, those other art hero epiphany-builders, Wong Kar-wai is continually going skyward, exploding his exclusive, up-to-date form of cinematic beauty over the narrative like a fireworks display.

This is cutting edge loneliness, the darkness at the edge of despair. Technically the film rides the wild highway. Kar-Wai races his camera like a Yamaha, using hand-held to drive the eye of the audience into the soul of pain. The title is ironic, of course.