Happy Together WORK IN PROGRESS
Happy Together (Chun gwong cha sit - 春光乍泄), director Wong Kar-Wai, cinematographer Chris Doyle, released in 1997, featuring two heavy actors (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu Wai)
Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong and take to the road for a holiday. Something is wrong and their relationship goes adrift. A disillusioned Yiu-Fai starts working at a tango bar to save up for his trip home. When a beaten and bruised Po-Wing reappears, Yiu-Fai is empathetic but is unable to enter a more intimate relationship. After all, Po-Wing is not ready to settle down. Yiu-Fai now works in a Chinese restaurant and meets the youthful Chang from Taiwan. Yiu-Fai's life takes on a new spin, while Po-Wing's life shatters continually in contrast.
(Plot summary, written by Perry Yu)
Aw-kommon's notes on Happy Together are typical of those who cannot approach a film without aligning it with definite paradigms and secure standards. In this case, the paradigm is Midnight Cowboy -- a film that belongs to a totally different genre, was written and shot according to naturalistic procedures of Hollywood commercial cinema and, most of all, deals with romance from a quite different perspective. In Midnight Cowboy redemption of homoeroticism comes through death, a strategy that was quite revealing of the morals that prevailed at the time the movie was produced. Happy Together, on the other hand, deals with romance as if it could have been homo-, hetero- or whatever, and even though homoeroticism is such an essential element to the narrative, the protagonists' love affair is a pretext for the emergence of their decentered identities, their search for love and friendship and, most important, it ends on a note of hope of future encounters. All that in a poetic tone, one that demands a continuous aesthetic reconstruction, hardly understood (or accepted) by those who are encapsulated in a world of conventional filmmaking.
(ZeGatti)
Wong Kar Wai and his long-time Aussie cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, took the actors to Buenos Aires with a vague idea of a movie they wanted to make, and improvised their way to a feature film, experimenting with film stocks and trying out story lines. The result is a collage of Buenos Aires nightlife, captured in B&W, monochrome, and ultra-saturated color, set against a soundtrack as wide ranging as vintage tango to Frank Zappa... Happy Together portends Wong’s opus, In the Mood for Love, with its deep sense of longing and loneliness, and teaches how the memory of passion can shape a lifetime.
Cataratas del Iguazú
(http://www.bing.com/travel/content/search?q=Best+Vistas+of+the+World%3a+Iguazu+Falls&FORM=TRSSPG)
Chun gwong cha sit - 春光乍泄 (Happy Together): Part 1/12
(video by Gheeshay)
the sex scene is here trimmed - you can watch this first part alternatively at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s13j6HNXXYs
Bar Sur, an intimate (and expensive) tango show venue in the Porteños City: you’ll pay handsomely to sip champagne at one of a dozen tables; the upscale dinner show is often participatory – so avoid it if you’re not ready to try a few tangled steps (Lonely Planet):
Chun gwong cha sit - 春光乍泄 (Happy Together): Part 2/12
(video by Gheeshay)
the soundtrack here is very poorly rendered
The cab scene in the following video portends the one from In the Mood for Love. And the view of the lamp (with the image of Cataratas del Iguazú) calls in my mind (maybe perversely, maybe just wrongly) a micro-stasis scene from Ozu's Late Spring.
The superb dance scene here in the following video:
Enters the third male (Chen Chang) with his greatly ambiguous play:
Another known Buenos Aires restaurant here (Cantina de Los 3 Amigos) and a great quote (It turns out that all lonely people are the same):
Chun gwong cha sit - 春光乍泄 (Happy Together): Part 9/12
(video by Gheeshay)
again the soundtrack is very poorly rendered
a great image of Hong Kong upside down:
Chun gwong cha sit - 春光乍泄 (Happy Together): Part 10/12
(video by Gheeshay)
again the soundtrack is very poorly rendered
again Bar Sur and finally Cataratas del Iguazú:
Ushuaia on Tiera del Fuego, the lighthouse at the end of the world and a great stasis preparing maybe the mood for 2046, Hong Kong (or Taipei) in all technological frenzy:
(Wong Kar-Way & Chris Doyle)
posted by Pierre Radulescu at 9:34 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home