Happy Together

Saw Happy Together, yet another Wong Kar-wai film, this time following the fraught relationship between two men.  They travel to Argentina where their car breaks down and they become stranded.  One becomes a bouncer at a tango club, the other becomes a male prostitute.  They have a falling out over the prostitution, but they're both bound together, the only Chinese men in a strange city.

So Wong's movies are usually very whimsical, containing little colorful flourishes and details that make the world seem like a magical place.  This whimsy is balanced by a grounding in life's real struggles.  In the last movie I reviewed here, My Blueberry Nights, I felt the scale was tipped too much in the whimsy direction.  This is quite the reverse.

The relationship of the central two characters is extremely fraught.  Gay folks already have a smaller pool of potential mates than straight folks do and this limit of choices is brought to the extreme here where, in very many ways, these two men are the only ones who understand each other.  They are jealous and fight over money, over each other's safety, over cigarettes.  At one point the prostitute guy gets his wrists broken by cruel mobsters and the bouncer guy practically imprisons him in their tiny shared apartment.  It's very grim, not very whimsical at all.

There's moments of course, where the veil lifts, as when they tango in the bouncer's bar, or when they record each other on cassette tapes, but these moments are fleeting and tinged with despair.  I was very disappointed since I was looking forward to seeing a swooning gay romance, but this was cut with too much reality for me.  A sad film.