Cheap Happy Together (DVD) (Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu Wai) (Kar Wai Wong) Price

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Customer Reviews of Happy Together

Changing perspectives...
Happy Together, by Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai, is one of my all-time favourite movies, and - along with The Tango Lesson - one of the movies that has effected me the most. To me, HT is one of those (rare) art products that manage to combine formal beauty, intellectual sharpness and emotional depth all into one.

I have watched HT many times, and each time I felt that it had a new meaning to convey. My impressions about this movie have therefore shifted with time, leading me not to a definite interpretation but to the knowledge that art - as life itself - can be looked at from different points of view.

The story line is quite simple: two lovers leave Hong Kong and go to Argentina; once there, they argue so much they decide to break up; one of them (Ho Po-Wing) prostitutes himself, while the other (Lai-Yiu Fai) works in a tango-bar and virtuously puts money aside to return home; one day, chance unites them and for a short while they live happily together; inevitably, however, the friskier one becomes dissatisfied with their conjugal life; they separate again, and this time it's really the end. Needless to say, the movie's title - as light-hearted as it sounds - is actually quite deceiving: the two men's relationship turns out to be a rather "unhappy" one.

The first few times I watched HT I couldn't help feeling disgusted by Ho Po-Wing's moral hideousness - I thought of him as the negative-model the movie meant to point the finger against. I thought the movie proved that although there are no "real heroes" some people do behave better than others, and that by self-discipline one could "redeem" one's soul... I thought the movie was about Aesthetics as a means of purification, as if Beauty could protect one from squalor. I admired Lai-Yiu Fai and mercilessly condemned Ho Po-Wing.

I still admire Lai-Yiu Fai, of course, but I now feel I was too superficial in judging Ho Po-Wing. I see he's not the monster I made him out to be in the past: he's a victim of his own temperament, a person misfortunate to the point of being unable to grasp the good life offers him. In this, I feel he well portrays many homosexuals, who, I'm afraid, often let happiness slip out of their hands, perhaps because a sick environment has taught them not to "love" but to "want." In my opinion, not only are we "all the same when we feel lonely," as Lai-Yiu Fai puts it - that is: inclined to promiscuous sex - we're also "all the same" in that we are all constantly on the verge of self-inflicted unhappiness.

Last time I watched HT, about a week ago, I got extremely sad, because I realised how easy it is for anyone to fall, and because through experience I've come to understand that so many of us are like Ho Po-Wing, damned to suffer the pains of degradation and solitude because of our "insatiability." We are taught that since we aren't attracted to someone of the opposite sex we are "bad" and have no values. Of course the effect of this is that we end up believing they are right. Thus, monogamy and fidelity become accessories, as tenderness and mutual support.

To me, Happy Together is about all this.

watchable travalogue, love story, human portrayal of gay men
My wife and I got different things from this movie, but we both
enjoyed it enough to be worth the time.

What struck me most vividly was the idea of just bravely taking
off to another country on little enough of a plan that running
out of money and being forced to survive like they do is even a
possibility. I don't know if that speaks more for the main
characters' love of life, or just their incompetence, but for me
it was a vividly portrayed and compelling case for the value of
the former. This might not have been a focus of the movie, and
I'm sure that for many people the grim conditions if anything
make the opposite case, but it really made me want to seize the
day, take off on a motorcycle and so on.

I think my wife was more affected by the love story. She grew up
in China with a moderately negative but mostly non-existent
awareness of homosexuality. Her reaction at the end of this
movie was that now she could much better understand the idea of
two men actually being in love with each other, just like anybody
else. I figure I got my money's worth just for that.

Now, as her husband, I do find it a little bit disturbing that
she finds such a screwed-up relationship so easy to relate to,
but it speaks well for the movie as tolerance propaganda.

The visual style didn't particularly speak to me. It was
occasionally intrusive, occasionally neat to look at, every once
in a while participated in the story-telling, and mostly I just
ignored it.

I spent much of the first half of the movie complaining to
myself that the director gives us no clue at all why these two
would want to be together, let alone as obsessively as they are.
Eventually, I accepted that the director's not incompetent, so if
he's not letting us know it's because he doesn't want to. Okay,
Kar-wai, whatever, man. I got along much better after I gave up
on that.