"Do you regret being with me?" Capturing love in Happy Together

Wong Kar-Wai will always be one of my favourite filmmakers of all time. Few manage to capture and create such poetic yet relatable moments on screen. His films are centred around relationships and what they teach us about ourselves, each other and, indeed, the world around us. His plots are pared back, often bare besides the central characters. His world and his plots are the people in his films. With these characters, we get an in-depth but realistic portrait of people in love. It is his juxtaposition between poetry and reality that, for me, makes this film so captivating.

They look, and often feel, like a dream. Wong Kar-Wai plays with time and colour. Sometimes scenes are slowed down or sped up, and images go from black and white to colour, but the world in the film is familiar nevertheless. His films capture the complexities of human emotion, often in few words, but the few spoken are powerful. We watch characters trying to navigate their own selves to try to understand their own emotions and feelings. The viewer watches characters make mistakes and often confusing decisions, but we as viewers realise how real this is as we often struggle to navigate ourselves and our own feelings.

This week’s Short Cut is a scene I like to call ‘Say Something’ from Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together (HT). This film follows Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai as the two men journey through Argentina in search of a waterfall, their relationship derailing as badly as their road trip. Fed up with his situation, Yiu-Fai gets a series of odd jobs to save enough money to go home to Hong King.

As with most co-dependent relationships, the two drift in and out of love and of each other's lives, needing and despising each other, walking away yet always finding a way back. Neither ever truly let their guard down to reveal themselves, but neither ever let go of the other either. Yiu-Fai, in particular, keeps the walls around his heart high, but when he meets Chang, a restaurant worker from Taiwan, his guard slowly comes down and this moment is the subject of our analysis.

Enjoying a night in the bar before Chang continues his trip around Argentina, he and Yiu-Fai drink into the night. Chang is headed for a lighthouse often referred to as the edge of the world. Here he has asked Yiu-Fai to record a message on his tape recorder and he will take it to the edge of the world with him. Chang leaves Yiu-Fai to ponder his message and goes dancing. The music is lively and those in the bar are in high spirits. Chang tells him to say something, even if it’s sad, though Yiu-Fai claims he isn’t sad.

Up until this moment, the most frequent emotions we have seen from Yiu-Fai have been anger and love, but a toxic, non-conventional love. At this moment, Yiu-Fai takes the tape recorder and the lively music softens to a faint muffle as if to protect Yiu-Fai’s precious words from the viewer. Time appears to stand still and the world quiets in anticipation of what might be said by such a quiet, angry, stoic man.

We never at any point hear if Yiu-Fai actually says anything, but what we see is a man whose walls come crumbling down as soon as someone gives him the first opportunity to be vulnerable. It is as though absolutely everything is hitting him at once and, even if he wanted to speak, he couldn’t. All he can do is sob. He tries to recover and compose himself, but Yiu-Fai isn’t in control anymore. His body has taken over and given him a moment to be free. Yiu-Fai has been hiding his emotions and putting up quite a masculine front, but someone has broken through, even if for all too brief a time.

What has Wong Kar-Wai taught us in this one scene? It suggests that the people who feel like our enemies can also be the same people that bring us safety. That the lack of their presence can bring us freedom, but also a lack of peace. The person that causes our torture and anguish can also be the one that relieves it. However, in this scene, Wong Kar-Wai is also showing us how much we deny ourselves and how deep the feelings we suppress just to keep someone in our lives are.

Such unfathomable emotions are expressed in a clip, the entire duration of which is one minute and twenty-nine seconds. This is what makes Wong Kar-Wai a master of his craft and Happy Together so special.