Wong Kar Wai - Happy Together
or, love me deathly
Catch up with me:
I had no regrets till I met you. Now my regrets could kill me.
And then Lai Yiu Fai (Tony Leung) runs away into the night, away from Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung).
It’s a moment of breaking, of a heart shattering, of a relationship ending again but for the first time on screen. The ending doesn’t last and we watch these two orbit one another, hurt each other and themselves.
Confined, even when the scenery expands. We’re in Argentina for this one, leaving China and Hong Kong behind. But even leaving behind Hong Kong’s cramped streets and the neo-noir escapades, we get, perhaps, his most claustrophobic movie to date.
This whole movie is Fai and Po Wing. There’s another character who pokes his head into the movie periodically, but this is all about these two men and their disastrous relationship that they want to break free of but also cannot live without.
Along with that, they are literally trapped in Argentina. They don’t have the money to buy a ticket to go home, and so Fai works menial jobs as a doorman and then a dishwasher/cook. Po Wing lives perilously, bouncing between lovers, refusing to get a job or even really take care of himself.
Watching this movie so closely focused on these two reminded me of so many relationships, both mine and those of others. A fountain spewing memories to rain down upon me, soak me through, leave me as broken as Fai and Po Wing.
The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
or, Save My Heart but Break My Legs When I was seventeen, my best friend was this kid named Eric. He was smart and handsome and charismatic. Most importantly, he was wild. He seemed to have nearly no impulse control and so he would sometimes just do the most bonkers thing you could think of.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about one such relationship. I’ll quote myself at length here:
We loved each other. We needed one another. I would have done anything to make him better. I choose to believe he would have done the same for me, if he had been able.
But slowly, Eric was ruining my life. Sabotaging it, even.
I remember telling him I needed to leave to go meet up with someone who I was hopelessly in love with for the moment. We were in his car. My car was at his house. She told me to come over and I told her I was on my way.
But we were driving around and he wouldn’t take me back to my car. He wouldn’t let me leave. He knew where I wanted to go and why, but he couldn’t let me go. Aggressively, he refused to take me to my car while we drove directionlessly.
He loved her too, maybe. Or maybe he saw where all this led. Maybe he knew that all the love we shared with one another would someday be poured into other people.
That I’d leave.
Eric and I weren’t lovers, but we were like brothers. Brothers who loved one another but also hated one another. Maybe even brothers who wanted to be one another, exchanging skins and lives, if only for a moment. To melt into one another and take only what we love from each other.
Of course, this is why and how we hurt one another.
It’s the reason Elena and Lila in The Neapolitan Novels continually tear one another apart, lashing out like caged animals, and brutalizing the heart they once shared, that they’d long to share again.
And once again, like always, I’m remembering Tereza and Tomas like it was real, like it all happened to me, like I was there.
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
And yet object we do. Again and again. Not through reason, like Tomas implies, but through pain.
We love and we hate and we bloom and we hurt in each other’s shine, our dual sunned life, two bodies with the same heartbeat threnodying away, shivering us to nothing but ash and dust caught in the wind, covering the windowsill of abandoned apartments, abandoned lives where our ghosts remain perpetually in dialogue, in monologue.
And it is a threnody. All these works.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Neapolitan Novels, and Happy Together.
A great wailing. A mourning.
A mourning for what we had. For the people we were. And all these works end with someone left behind. Someone forever caught in the tail of the other’s comet.
I fucking hate you, but I love you
These lyrics from Tyler the Creator kept gonging in my skull while I watched Happy Together. This bitter, broken romance.
I’m bad at keeping my emotions bubbled
You’re good at being perfect
We’re good at being troubled
Fai and Po Wing share a bed and then trade beds. They long to plumb each other’s secrets, but they cannot trust the heart of the other any longer. So many times have they hurt. So many times have they been hurt.
While the other is gone, so is their trust. They rummage through one another’s belongings trying to find the other person.
They cannot be happy together. They cannot be happy apart.
And amidst these three stories of ruined love, of broken hearts, we have the political backdrop and the uncertainty, unspeakable hope or fear, unstability.
We have the Soviet’s crushing the Prague Spring, the striving for and against Italian democracy, and the British handing Hong Kong back to the CCCP.
Terror and violence and yet that flicker of light. We see it at Iguazu Falls, that vast openness, the showering water, the infinite hope.
Let’s sail away disappearing in a mist
Let’s sail away with a whisper and a kiss
Or vanish from a road somewhere, like Tereza and Tomas,
Suspended in this bliss
Happy Together has been praised considerably since its debut in 1997. Considered one of the best LGBT movies of all time, it’s also ranked among the best foreign language films by the BBC. Further, it remains one of the most important and most acclaimed gay Asian films.
The legacy is vast, owing to the style, the story, and the acting. Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung were already among the finest actors of the 90s. Putting them together to play off one another for 100 minutes became, I think, a peak in both of their careers.
The kind of acting rarely ever seen and certainly never to be replicated.
This movie isn’t about coming out or dealing with societal expectations. In fact, it seems clear that Fai at least is not out. The characters don’t question their sexuality or their masculinity or anything like that.
It’s about two humans in love, who happen to both be men. The movie never draws attention to its queerness, nor does it ever shy away from it.
It is confidently gay.
Confidently a love story.
It gave Wong Kar Wai his first and only win at Cannes. While his career and recognition was already fast rising, this win established him permanently as a true international auteur and paved the way for his greatest artistic triumph.
And Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is so lush and gorgeous, but also experimenting with high contrast, with black and white, and letting all this experimentation, this playfulness, heighten the drama between Fai and Po Wing.
I remember watching this fifteen years ago on my tiny laptop screen in a dark and tiny room while I was having the worst summer of my life—this time, not due to heartbreak but the backbreaking and soulcrushing life of commercial painting—and though I longed to see it on a screen large and capable of showing me this beauty, I find it, now, appropriate to the close claustrophobia of this relationship.
And I remember Fai holding a tape recorder to his mouth, sobbing.
And I remember Po Wing holding Fei’s abandoned bedding and clothes, sobbing.
I’m not sad.
And I remember a lighthouse at world’s end where the discordant, indistinct sobbing was released, freeing Fai, finally, from love’s terrorism.
And I remember Rimbaud and Verlaine like I was there, like I was one of them, like I was all of them, always them, shooting the other in the hand begging him to stay while I told the cops he was trying to kill me just to get away.
The summer of 2021, I wrote a novel. I’ve mentioned it before. I wrote a novel about a broken heart. About my theoretical brokenheart. The one that would exist had my wife left my life.
It may be the best thing I’ve ever written. My most powerful statement of love. My most complete statement of horror.
I cannot even look at it.
It nauseates me to think about its claustrophobia, its intensity of feeling, the way it is so trapped within its narrator’s head and the internal holocaust hollowing him out.
And I’m sixteen again, discovering Rimbaud.
By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
And I remember a poem from long ago that shattered me at 3am and made me set the book down and cry in my tiny room and I remember reading it to you in an empty hostel cafe at 5am in Nice on the most important night of my life and I remember reading it at the wedding of two of my dearest friends while they watched me with tears of love and hope and joy brimming their eyes.
You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my leaves.
You shall quench my thirst and
I will feed you fruit,
though time takes my seed.
And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth
you will give me hope.
And my voice you will always hear.
And my hand you will always have.
For I will shelter you.
And I will comfort you.
And even when we are nothing left,
not even in death,
I will remember you.
Let me sleep
I am tired of my grief
And I would like you
To love me, to love me, to love me
And I’m cascading away from myself, breaking to pieces, to dust to drift like constellations through halflit rooms where you’ll one day remember me, dream of me as the man I longed to be, as the one who loved and lost, of the one who loved and held on tight enough after promising to never let you go.
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
Sometimes I’m caught in certain memories. Memories burning bright. Memories that terrorize me.
And I wonder what I could have done for so many of you who are no longer with me, who will never read these words, who may no longer think of me, remember me, consider me.
I cannot help but relive certain moments of my life and dissect the moment we turned away from one another for the last time. The last moment I heard your voice, felt your touch, and what I could have done to make you stay, to allow myself to stay, to make us better, to heal myself and maybe you too.
The words never came.
They still don’t come. I cannot be who you needed me to be. I cannot go back, can never undo the things I said, the way I went cold, the way I burned, the way I broke myself or broke you. Cannot ever be the person I wish I had been when you needed me most.
I can but be me.
Almost every day, that’s enough for me.
But I remember.
I remember Tereza and Tomas, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Elena and Lila, Fai and Po Wing, and I even remember myself and Eric, the other half to a ruined heart, and how I abandoned him to grow a new one, to become myself, to heal myself, to become a man who could come to love another and allow that loved one to make me into a father.
And these versions of me, finally, learned to be happy together.
But I let you go and you shattered like glass.
And I still don’t know the words to speak, the ways to make your shattering undone. To put you back together.
I never found the words to heal that version of myself.
Had I found those words when I was nine or fourteen or twenty, I may never have written any of this. All these words. All the millions of words that surround me, that consume me, that define me, that cage me.
A different version of this essay exists and I almost told it this way.
Rather than write this all down, fill your screen with words, I nearly did something else entirely to explain, to review, to make you understand a moment in time that is Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, to explain how two hearts unhappily together can become separate and whole, can become a single heart happy together with its older, broken one.
How the versions of self can stitch themselves happily together.
You may have noticed all the allusions, all the songs, all the lines of poetry, none of them mine, and yet all of them mine, for I have claimed them, grafted them to my bones, dissolved them in my watery blood to thicken it, allow it to congeal.
Had I had the confidence in you—which is to say the confidence in myself—to understand what this collage would have meant, I would have let the words of others that have meant so much to me speak for this movie, speak for me, tell you the story of two bodies sharing the same heartbeat, the same breath, and how that sharing nearly killed them.
How death is not the end.
How healing happens, at least for the one that remains reaching back for the one now gone to time, to memory, to the mists, suspended in bliss.
I would have let them reveal me to all of you.
But I remember Tereza and Tomas.
I remember Sabina reading that Tomas and Tereza died, far away, her own past severed from her present.
Wolf.
Howl.
And if you’re one of those kind souls looking to get into my fiction, here are the novels I’ve released recently:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl. Out now!
Some free books for your trouble:
"... all these works end with someone left behind. Someone forever caught in the tail of the other’s comet."
Wow. Was recently thinking of a past love in similar terms: "a meteor streaking across my sky."