One Shot invites close readings of the basic unit of film grammar.
Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997).
In exploring the romantic yearning that propels discordant lovers to seek reconciliation, the plot and visual language of Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997) makes repeated reference to Argentina’s Iguazú Falls. Seeking to recuperate their faltering relationship, the film's main characters, Fai and Po-wing, journey from Hong Kong to Argentina to visit the falls. As the couple repeatedly fights and makes up, the oft-mentioned falls come to represent the boundary-dissolving, all-encompassing ideal of love that Fai and Po-wing can never access—the destination we sense they may never reach.
Inaccessible love was the force that created Iguazú, according to local lore. Guarani legend posits that the serpent deity Boi, in a fit of jealous rage, cleaved a waterway to separate the lovers Naipi and Tarobá, thus creating the world’s largest waterfall system. Within the film, the falls retain their mythic status, impossibly promising an experience of romantic coupling that mimics the sublimity conjured by the waterfalls.
While Fai and Po-wing’s trip is long and meandering, a lamp with a painting of Iguazú cheaply printed on its shade remains ever by their side. Toward the end of the film, we watch through a doorway in Po-wing’s dingy apartment as he stares desperately at the lamp, having just been dumped by Fai. The camera inches closer. He surveys the contours of the lampshade with uncharacteristic intensity, as though beholding the face of his lover. Leaning into the lamp, he seems as if he might kiss it. Instead, he tenderly holds it between his hands as he gazes into its light, fixated by a printed couple looking out over the falls. From his point of view, the lamp’s fibrous shade encompasses the whole screen.
Rather than a window into another world, or a light source illuminating our own, the lamp is a mass-produced material object: a kitsch representation of the real falls. A strong disjunction forms between Po-wing’s beguilement and the object’s absolute ordinariness. This relationship isn’t discordant, but speaks to a compatibility between kitsch and the sublime. Since the late 19th century, kitsch—an aesthetic mode characterized by tackiness, mass production, and sentimentality—has often been framed as resistant to emotional and intellectual authenticity, even an opponent of the elevated perceptual experiences engendered by fine art. Instead, kitsch objects can embody ideological tropes or dominant cultural values—such as an image of idealized coupledom—that shape our perceptions of reality. This may point to why Po-wing connects so strongly with this kitsch object. On one level, the saccharine sensibility of kitsch is digestible, numbing the pains of reality. But for Po-wing specifically, this image is also a mass-produced gateway to the sublime, an aesthetic experience capable of rattling one’s sense of self entirely. His preoccupation with the lamp transcends its surface attributes, representing instead a profound rupture in his faith in romantic ideals.
In a single shot, Wong encapsulates a triple displacement: romantic happiness projected onto the falls, attachment redirected from the falls onto their image, and the image of the waterfalls transferred onto a commodity. Happy Together therefore meditates not only on romantic yearning, but on the intimacy forged between people and objects or other sites of fantasy. This intimacy can be grievous at times, forcing us to reckon with the gaps between our lived experiences and the images of the good life propagated by kitsch and other forms of mass media, including film. In this way, Wong’s shot of Po-wing beholding the Iguazú lamp models one version of the cinematic experience itself: light passes through a rotating medium, a mass-produced object. Like Po-wing, we sit before the screen until our eyes blur, entranced by its images.