Wong Kar-wai, Me and My Other Self – On Happy Together

Last night, my phone rang at two in the morning. I'm a heavy sleeper and usually don't hear anything, but the vibration and ringtone startled me awake.

— “Are you okay?” I asked.
— “Can I call you?” he replied.
— Wait a minute, please — I said again, leaving my room and heading to the bathroom, the only place where I can have a bit of privacy.

It took me a few minutes, but eventually, I understood. Paul was drunk, and the euphoria brought on by alcohol had pushed him to grab his phone and call me. Clearly, he had mistaken me for someone else, but he didn’t realize it until this morning.

Among his slurred speech and labored breathing, he managed to say something that left me stunned and reminded me of the melancholic and poetic universe of Wong Kar-wai’s cinema:

“Hate me, hate me with the force of the nine circles of Hell. Hate me with the intensity of the 24 cantos of the Iliad. Hate me, hate me.”

If I could compare what happened last night to a film by the master of ghostly effects and blurry movement, it would be Happy Together, and the reason is simple: Paul wants to start over and leave everything behind, but at the same time, he can’t forget the story of the loves he wants to leave in the past. The weight of being is too much for him.

Unlike the neon lights that color the nightscape of Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong, here we are accompanied only by the poor and dim glow of streetlights on the corners of Lima’s most remote neighborhoods. Beneath the smog created by our hellish traffic, the soundtrack to our sorrows is the harsh and piercing cries of street vendors—figures shaped by the roughness of their surroundings.

“Love is the scariest feeling that exists,” says a popular teen singer.

Love is the central thread of Wong Kar-wai’s filmography, though not in the typical way where couples have happy endings and live together forever. In that, the Chinese director and the teenage singer agree. The love Wong Kar-wai portrays doesn’t give you hope—it takes it away, tramples on it, and spits it back at you. It’s the kind of love that hurts because it’s never fully realized, because it brushes against the Other without ever fully merging with them.

Who among us hasn’t suffered through a love like that? Who hasn’t internalized melancholy through a film like this? Who hasn’t found some kind of catharsis in projecting themselves onto its protagonists? That’s why Happy Together is so special to me.

The story closely follows a couple trying to start over far from their homeland, in Argentina, hoping to leave their bad memories behind. Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai could easily be labeled as having a toxic and explosive relationship. They act impulsively and without thinking—at least Po-Wing, the daring and domineering one, who contrasts with Fai, the more submissive and introverted partner. Thanks to the voice-over narration of the protagonists’ thoughts, we can sympathize with one, the other, or even both.

There’s no need to mention the technical devices the director uses to imprint his unique touch on his films; what truly matters here is the dialogue between the actors and the atmosphere that envelopes them.

In that sense, Paul—the protagonist of my small and ridiculous anecdote—reminds me a bit of both of them. And of myself, too. We all have someone who ties us to the past, who won’t let us move on and start anew. And it’s not always someone else; sometimes it’s ourselves. The mind—our worst enemy—gnaws at our thoughts and tightens our chest, reminding us of all our flaws. It becomes a kind of Po-Wing, who seeks us out just when we’d finally managed to forget everything.

Still, in the emotional seesaw of contemporary life, we are lucky that people like Chang exist—the friend Fai meets in Argentina on his long journey to Iguazú. He represents all the friends we make in life, however short it may be.

Chang is our support and only confidant in a faraway, unknown country; that country being our solitude and introspection. And at the end of the road lies Iguazú, the majestic waterfall that drops its endless veil of water. Through its grandeur, we realize that not even such a vast and beautiful landscape can bring us happiness.

When Fai arrives, he says:

“I finally made it to Iguazú. I feel a little sad. The two of us should be here.”

And that line sums up all the things we try to do but never quite achieve: forgetting loves, stories, experiences that—despite the pain they caused us—we still cling to. Like Fai clings to the Iguazú lamp that Ho Po-Wing gave him at the start of the film.