Wkw the cinema of wong kar wai pdf

Book Title: Celluloid Comrades Book Subtitle: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas Book Author(s): Song Hwee Lim Published by: University of Hawai'i Press. (2006) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqwhf.9

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Wong Kar-wai is undoubtedly the most hip director in contempo-rary Chinese cinemas and enjoys a cult following worldwide.1 His debut film, As Tears Go By (Wangjiao Kamen, also known as Rexue nan’er, 1988), brought him critical attention in Hong Kong, but it was his subse- quent films such as Days of Being Wild (A Fei zhengzhuan, 1990), Ashes of Time (Dongxie Xidu 1994), Chungking Express (Chongqing senlin, 1994), and Fallen Angels (Duoluo tianshi, 1995) that propelled him to international sta- tus. In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000) won Tony Leung Chiu- wai the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. Wong’s latest film was the long-awaited 2046, which was released in 2004. My focus in this chapter is his 1997 film, Happy Together, which won him the best director award at Cannes.

Shot in Argentina, geographically the antipodes of Hong Kong, Happy Together is a film simultaneously about home and being away from home. The film problematizes the intertwining relationship between sexuality, home, nation, and space. In this chapter, I propose to examine the trope of travel and how sexuality is negotiated vis-à-vis the diasporic identities of the protagonists. I want to raise the following questions: What does it mean to negotiate sexuality in a diasporic space as opposed to doing so at home? In what ways are the material conditions of travel and diaspora related to the figure of homosexuality in these representations? Or, to adapt James Clifford’s questions in the epigraph above, how do different sexualities travel, and what kinds of representations do they produce? What is the relationship between the trope of travel, the locales of home and away, and sexuality?

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Travelling Sexualities Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together

How do different populations, classes and genders travel? What kinds of knowledges, stories, and theories do they produce?

— James Clifford, “Notes on Travel and Theory”

4

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Happy Together has been described as belonging to “the genre of the ‘road movie’ where the travel metaphor becomes a search for ‘home’ and ‘identity’ through the three male protagonists’ (individual and collective) quests” (Yue 2000, 254). For Iain Chambers, to travel “implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, the knowl- edge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a potential home- coming” (1994, 5). Many discourses of travel and diaspora are embedded in a dialectic relationship with the notion of home as the origin of jour- neys to which one can eventually return from one’s journeys. It is thus appropriate that I begin my discussion by situating Happy Together in the context of the home, which is Hong Kong and its return to the PRC on July 1, 1997.

Deviance and Defiance: Happy Together?

Inspired by Manuel Puig’s novel The Buenos Aires Affair, Happy Together traces the troubled relationship between Ho Po-wing (the late Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing; henceforth Po-wing) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung; henceforth Fai).2 The film is narrated mainly from Fai’s point of view via voice-over, a trademark of Wong’s films. In the opening sequence, the couple is in a hotel room, where Po-wing suggests to Fai that they start over. An explicit sex scene between the couple follows, accompanied by Fai’s voice-over: “‘Let’s start over’—these are Ho Po-wing’s favorite words. I admit these words are a killer for me. We’ve been together for a long time, and we’d broken up before in the process. But I don’t know why each time I hear him utter these words to me, I’ll be back with him again. Because of wanting to start over, I left Hong Kong with him. As we travelled, we ended up in Argentina.”3 The opening sex scene is almost a shock tactic towards the audience, as there are subsequently no more sex scenes between the couple, and none of the other sex scenes in Happy Together is quite as explicit. It recalls Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 film, Betty Blue: 37˚2 le matin, which also features an opening sex scene (albeit hetero- sexual in this case) accompanied by the voice-over of the male protagonist, Zorg: “I have known Betty for a week. We made love every night. The forecast was for storms.” The voice-over in both films provides an account of the history of the relationships between the protagonists.

The trope of travel is highlighted right from the start of Happy Together: inspired by a picture of the Iguazu Falls on a lampshade that Po-wing bought when the couple first arrived in Argentina, the couple embarks on a journey to the falls. Zorg’s last sentence above also applies to the couple in Happy Together as, following the opening sex scene, the

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film shows their stormy relationship: they quarrel as they lose their way on the trip to the Iguazu Falls, and Po-wing suggests they break up and start over if they meet again. Back in Buenos Aires, Fai works as a door- man at a tango bar, whereas Po-wing survives by hustling. The couple is reunited after Po-wing has been severely beaten up by one of his sex tricks. Ministering to Po-wing’s injury but keeping his passport, Fai regards Po- wing’s recovery period as their happiest time together. During this period, Fai spots the man responsible for Po-wing’s injury and hits him with a bottle, thus losing his job at the tango bar. He subsequently works in a kitchen at a Chinese restaurant with a young man from Taiwan, Chang (Chang Chen). Fai and Po-wing break up again after the latter has recov- ered. Chang quits his job to travel to Ushuaia before returning to Taiwan. Fai starts a new job at an abattoir. Saving enough money, Fai travels to the Iguazu Falls. Po-wing moves into the apartment previously occupied by Fai, where Fai has left Po-wing’s passport. Fai returns to Hong Kong but stops over en route in Taipei in search of Chang.

In her analysis of Happy Together, Rey Chow consciously departs from the tendency, whenever a non-Western work is being analyzed, “to affix a kind of reflectionist value by way of geopolitical realism—so that a film made in Hong Kong around 1997, for instance, would invariably be approached as having something to do with the factographic ‘reality’ of Hong Kong’s return to the People’s Republic of China” (1999, 32). While I sympathize with Chow’s desire to “counter the analytically reductionist readings, ubiquitous inside and outside the academy” (ibid.), I agree with Helen Hok-sze Leung, who, in her response to Chow’s stance, argues that “to approach the film text as though it were hermetically sealed from the historic moment of its production also seems to me an untenable tactic” (2001, 446–447n27).4 Drawing references from the film’s diegesis, I will illustrate below why a reading of Happy Together cannot be totally divorced from the geopolitical context of 1997. One could in fact argue that 1997 serves as the main impetus for the production of the film.

For Ackbar Abbas, July 1, 1997, “is not just a terminal date that falls sometime in the future” but, for the time leading up to it, also serves as “an ever-present irritant, a provocation, and a catalyst for change” (1997, 22). Making a film about “deviant” sexuality immediately before Hong Kong’s handover to a regime (in)famous for its high-handed treatment of homo- sexuals can be seen as an act of defiance. While authorial intention should not be taken simply at face value, it is nonetheless noteworthy that Wong reportedly said he was making Happy Together because Hong Kong needed a “real gay film” before 1997 (Liu Zeyuan 1997, 33).5 Billed as “A Story about Reunion” in one version of the film’s posters, the film’s title, Happy

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Together, works as an ironic suggestion—wishful thinking even?—that Hong Kong might be able to live happily together with its new mainland Chinese master. As Jeremy Tambling proposes, read as two interroga- tives—Happy? Together?—the film’s title also constitutes “an oxymoron,” raising the question of whether happiness and togetherness are not mutu- ally exclusive (2003, 77).

Indeed, the choice of location for the film cannot be unintentional. As Hong Kong’s antipodes, Argentina provides a direct albeit unseen fast track between the two locales through the center of the earth, underlin- ing the dialectic relationship between home and the diasporic space.6 The opening credits are set against a glaringly bright red background, a color closely associated with communist China. Inserted in between the credits is a close-up of Po-wing’s and Fai’s Hong Kong passports (issued by the British authorities) being stamped by the Argentine customs officer. The disappearance of Hong Kong from the film’s narrative, the impending change in its political status, and the tropes of travel and diaspora are simultaneously highlighted in this brief sequence. Hong Kong appears in the film only towards the end, when Fai wonders what Hong Kong might look like from Argentina, whereupon a montage of Hong Kong’s cityscapes is shown upside down, literalizing the antipodal relationship between the two locales.

Happy Together poses a defiant challenge to China’s claim to Hong Kong by introducing the factor of Taiwan, an antagonistic regime regarded as a renegade province by the PRC government. As Audrey Yue argues, “as either one or the other (of the other China), Taiwan can be considered as the third space that disrupts the reunification between Hong Kong and the Mainland” (2000, 260). Towards the end of the film, as noted, Fai transits at Taipei before returning to Hong Kong. The first scene in Taiwan—in a hotel room where Fai wakes up, specifically dated February 20, 1997—shows a televised news report of the death of Deng Xiaoping, China’s then paramount leader who had expressed his wish to witness Hong Kong’s return to China.7 Taiwan’s rebel status is reinforced as it is chosen as the site at which the denial of Deng’s wish is announced. More important, the film does not end in Hong Kong but in Taipei, where the third protagonist, Chang, provides a possibility of the promise of “happy together” for Fai, suggesting that Taiwan might become Fai’s pre- ferred home over China-ruled Hong Kong. In “A Story about Reunion,” Happy Together deliberately designates Fai’s final destination not as Hong Kong but instead as Taiwan, where a militant independence movement rejects Taiwan’s reunification with China.

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Fai and His Friends: The Fassbinder Connection

Wong’s above-mentioned comment on making a real gay film before 1997 must be understood in the context of Hong Kong cinema. Though many Hong Kong films have featured homosexual characters or touched upon the theme of homosexuality before Wong’s Happy Together, most of these are slapstick comedies littered with gay stereotypes that do not deal with the issue of homosexuality in a serious manner. While what is a (real) gay film is open to definition and debate, Happy Together is arguably the first Hong Kong film that does not pathologize or caricature its homosexual protagonists but treats them as rounded characters worthy of engagement and empathy; nor does its representation aim to problematize homosex- uality as a theme. As Tambling argues, “Happy Together contains no dis- cussions of homosexuality whatsoever, nor any moments which imply that the film is trying to argue homosexuality as ‘natural’ or to place it in any context. It makes no attempt to work, therefore, as a ‘gay’ film. Like the characters who seem to have come from nowhere, insofar as they have lack [sic] histories, homosexuality is there but it is not spoken about” (2003, 21). Tambling’s argument recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s com- ment on his 1974 film, Fox and His Friends; the comment can also be used to describe the position of Wong’s Happy Together in the context of Hong Kong cinema: “It is certainly the first film in which the characters are homosexuals, without homosexuality being made into a problem. In films, plays or novels, if homosexuals appear, then homosexuality was the prob- lem, or it was a comic turn. But here homosexuality is shown as com- pletely normal, and the problem is something quite different; it’s a love story, where one person exploits the love of the other person, and that’s really the story I always tell” (Fassbinder 1975).

As it happens, while looking for an English (or foreign) title for the film, Wong and his crew started their brainstorming session with Fox and His Friends (Doyle 1997).8 Another title suggested was 3 Amigos (friends), the name of the bar where Fai and Chang hang out in Happy Together. For Tambling, the bar’s name is significant for both the number and the notion of friends (2003, 55), though it must be qualified that Po-wing and Chang do not know each other in the film, thus making 3 Amigos not as appropriate a foreign title as, for example, Fai and His Friends.

There is, moreover, another more significant Fassbinder connection in Wong’s film: the abattoir where Fai works is reminiscent of a similar setting in Fassbinder’s 1978 film, In a Year with 13 Moons. In the abattoir

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sequence in Happy Together, Fai pushes carcasses around (figure 4.1) and flushes the floor with a hose to wash away the blood. A shower scene in the communal bathroom of the abattoir accentuates the homoerotic fla- vor of Wong’s film.9 Fai’s voice-over accompanying this sequence reveals that Po-wing has been in touch to ask for his passport, but Fai does not want to see him for fear that Po-wing might utter those deadly words (“Let’s start over”) to him. Not totally unlike the sequences in Happy Together and Betty Blue, the opening sequence of In a Year with 13 Moons features a sex scene, but it is more of a failed attempt at having sex: dressed as a man and having successfully cruised another man in the park, Elvira, the male-to-female transsexual protagonist, is beaten up halfway into the sexual act when the man discovers that Elvira has no penis. Like Happy Together and Betty Blue, Fassbinder’s film has a voice-over recount- ing the protagonist’s relationship with his/her lover, though this voice- over does not accompany the opening but the abattoir sequence. More important, the abattoir sequence in In a Year with 13 Moons also parades carcasses around (figure 4.2) and has scenes of blood being hosed away on the floor, and it is possibly where Happy Together drew its inspiration. The two films are clearly related on the visual, aural/narratorial, and thematic levels.

For Fassbinder, a love story is invariably about the exploitation of love, and the exploitation in Fox and His Friends “has to do with the social, and not the sexual, orientation of the characters” (Thomsen 1997, 183). In Fox and His Friends, the bourgeois son of a factory owner uses the money his proletarian male lover won in a lottery to salvage his father’s ailing

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Figure 4.1. Fai pushes carcasses around in Happy Together. (Copyright Block 2 Pictures/ Prémon H./Seowoo Film/Jet Tone Production, 1997)

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business, only to dump his lover when the money dries up. If Fox and His Friends can be regarded as “a study of homosexuality and capitalism” (Shattuc 1995, 120), the social (or rather economic) condition of the pro- tagonists is the aspect that has been neglected in most discussions of Happy Together.

Travelling Identities

Caren Kaplan argues that while the terms of displacement found in Euro- American critical practice rarely admit to material conditions that include modern imperialism, industrialization, and decolonialization (1996, 1), there is a tendency that the terms and tropes of travel and the metaphors and symbols used to represent displacement refer to “individualized, often elite, circumstances” (ibid., 4). For Kaplan, to question travel is to inquire into the ideological function of metaphors in discourses of displacement and to historicize the use of terms such as “sites, borders, maps, and dias- poras as well as exile, nomadism, and migrancy” (ibid., 26).

Following Kaplan, I propose to examine the discursive terms vis-à-vis the diasporic identities of the protagonists in Happy Together. So far I have been using the term “travel” to describe the journeys the protagonists have taken from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Argentina and the terms “dias-

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Figure 4.2. Display of carcasses in Fassbinder’s In a Year with 13 Moons. (Copyright Tango- Film/Project Filmproduktion im Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978)

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pora” and “diasporic” to denote the state or condition of their existence in the space away from home. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur concur that the term “diaspora” is often used as a catchall to speak of and for all movements, “however privileged, and for all dislocations, even symbolic ones,” and hence argue that theorizations of diaspora “need not, and should not, be divorced from historical and cultural specificity” (2003, 3). It is my contention that the protagonists in Happy Together pose taxonom- ical, and thus epistemological, challenges to the trope of travel and that it is precisely the historical and cultural specificities that shore up the many discursive terms associated with diaspora that are far from clear-cut.

For example, Clifford has argued that diaspora is different from travel in that it is not temporary. It involves “dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from home (and in this it is different from exile, with its frequently individualistic focus)” (1997, 287). Clifford distin- guishes travel from diaspora on the basis of temporality. However, as he has rightly asked in the context of “Fourth world [indigenous] peoples” claiming “‘first-nation’ sovereignty”—“How long does it take to become ‘indigenous’?” (ibid., 288–289)—could we not also ask, “How long does it take for a traveller to become diasporic?” In Happy Together, the pro- tagonists begin their journeys as travellers to Argentina but end up stay- ing there for longer than intended as they have run out of money. Fai and Chang subsequently become what can be classified as (illegal) guest- workers, whereas Po-wing’s economic dependence on his tricks and on Fai is even harder to define. These characters do not necessarily seek to integrate with their host country or with an existent overseas Chinese community, but as time passes, their status as travellers metamorphoses into a diasporic condition that may yet defy taxonomical classification. As Caren Kaplan notes, “The fact that the material conditions of displace- ment for many people blur these distinctions or that many modern sub- jects may participate in any number of these versions of displacement over a lifetime—never embodying any one version singly or simplistically— requires material histories of cultural production that would emphasize emergent subject positions and critical and cultural practices that are more responsive to transnational conditions” (1996, 110).

This is one of the reasons why Chow’s alternative strategy of reading Happy Together in terms of Lacanian post-structuralism and Freudian psy- choanalysis may not be any less problematic than a (possibly reductionist) geopolitical one, especially since, as Kaplan points out, dislocation is often expressed “in singular rather than collective terms, as purely psychologi- cal or aesthetic situations rather than as a result of historical circum- stances” (C. Kaplan 1996, 4). While there is no suggestion that the char-

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acters in Happy Together are leaving Hong Kong because of the political changes about to happen in 1997 (Tambling 2003, 21), in light of the geo- political reality it is certainly not far-fetched to see their sojourn as a par- ticipation in the collective exodus from Hong Kong, especially given that their deviant sexuality may not find favor with the new regime. This read- ing will add to, rather than reduce, the film’s complexity, as Fai and Po- wing can be regarded at once as partly political refugees (though they have no recourse to seeking political asylum in such terms in their host country), partly sexual exiles, and partly tourists looking for a new locale to start their relationship over. As financial problems leave them stranded in Argentina, they assume new identities as illegal workers or even illegal immigrants (assuming their visas have expired), while simultaneously embodying their other diasporic identities delineated above.

In an examination of the material conditions that engender modes of travel, the issue of class inevitably surfaces on both the domestic and global levels. In his analysis of Happy Together, Tambling highlights the working-class background of the characters in contradistinction to the “thoroughly bourgeois” background in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (2003, 66). While this is accurate on a micro level within the confines of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the fact that these working-class characters can afford to travel to Argentina (notwithstanding Fai’s stealing of money from his boss)—and more important, that their travel is not borne out of an economic imperative to seek employment abroad—demands a reconfiguration of class status on a macro scale. That is, in a world where there are “first-world zones” in formerly “developing” countries and “third-world zones” in supposedly “first-world” nations (Braziel and Man- nur 2003, 11), the working-class background of the protagonists at home should not obscure their comparatively privileged material conditions, which make their travel to Argentina—a country unquestionably lower on the global economic order than Hong Kong or Taiwan—possible in the first place, while it throws into question the usefulness of a world sys- tems classification.

Therefore, diaspora and diasporic movement must be examined within the context of global capitalism (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 11). Tambling acknowledges that Happy Together responds to the power of globalization, as Taiwan has also been presented as “a place with an eco- nomic power Argentina lacks, for Taiwan has been exporting coach-loads of tourists to Buenos Aires” (2003, 63), where it is Fai’s job as a doorman at Bar Sur to welcome them. While Chang distinguishes himself from these package tourists, his reasons for leaving Taiwan (“Because I’m unhappy”) and for staying on in Argentina (“There’s no point returning

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when you haven’t thought things through”) betray a luxury of travel that stems from a spiritual need for self-exploration rather than material poverty. To say the very least, despite their working-class background, none of the three protagonists seem to be the breadwinners on whom their families depend financially back home, and despite having to work illegally in manual labor (with the exception of Po-wing) in the diasporic space, they have been able to save enough money not only for a home- bound air ticket, but also for a visit to their chosen “holiday destinations” in Argentina before returning home. The confidence that Fai has in know- ing where to locate Chang in the future, having visited the food stall run by Chang’s parents in Taipei, is a confidence grounded, however uncon- sciously, in a sense of financial security that would engender the expres- sion—even fruition perhaps—of his sexuality as “happy together.”

As stated from the outset, many discourses of travel and diaspora problematize the relationship between home and away, with earlier mod- els privileging “the geographical, political, cultural, and subjective spaces of the home-nation as the authentic space of belonging and civic partic- ipation, while devaluing and bastardizing the states of displacement or dislocation, rendering them inauthentic places of residence” (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 6). As Happy Together is one of the two films in this book (the other being The Wedding Banquet) whose diegeses are set outside of East Asia, its representation of diasporic sexualities travelling in Argen- tina cannot totally escape the problematic of home and away. As R. Radha- krishnan argues, “Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier ‘elsewhere’ in an active and critical relationship with the cultural politics of one’s present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement. ‘Home’ then becomes a mode of interpretive in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location” (1996, xiii–xiv).

In what follows, I will offer an analysis of Happy Together that focuses on the negotiation of travelling sexualities in the in-between space created as a site of tension between home and away. Delineating the relationship between Fai and Po-wing and that between Fai and Chang, I will show that the construction of sexualities vis-à-vis home and away is predicated on a set of opposing values and argue that the film’s deployment of the spatial construction of sexuality reinstates the idealization of home.

Domesticity, Monogamy, and Private Sex

In terms of the relationship between home and sexuality, Fai is associated with home, a longing for home, and a difficult relationship with his sexu-

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ality vis-à-vis the figure of his father back home, whereas Po-wing seem- ingly has no home or no need for home and flaunts his sexuality wherever he is. (The third character, the sexually ambiguous Chang, is travelling around but with the intention of going home and is thus more aligned with Fai.) It has been noted that definitions of home shift across a num- ber of registers: “home can mean where one usually lives, or it can mean where one’s family lives, or it can mean one’s native country” (Ahmed 2000, 86). The home away from home that Fai sets up in Argentina is where the drama of his relationship with Po-wing is usually played out, and this home can also be seen as Fai’s symbolic longing for his home in Hong Kong.

The film sets up a corollary of contrasting values between Fai and Po- wing. Financially, Fai is more prudent and holds regular jobs, whereas Po- wing does not work and lives off his sexual partners. Emotionally, Fai tends to bottle things up and is prone to alcoholism and violence, whereas Po-wing wears his moods on his sleeves and often imposes them on Fai. Sexually, Fai is faithful and seeks monogamy while Po-wing is promiscu- ous. Socially, Fai is a domestic creature who returns home immediately after work, whereas Po-Wing is a flâneur who feels claustrophobic at home and loves cruising in the streets. Taken together, these opposing traits can be grouped spatially and ideologically into home-as-private-sphere versus city-as-public-sphere. They are also embedded in a discourse of sex and sexuality as private, personal, and intimate set against the notion of pub- lic sex as anonymous, promiscuous, and impersonal.

The private space for the realization of a monogamous, stable, inti- mate relationship in Happy Together is the home away from home estab- lished by Fai. It is during the period of Po-wing’s recovery, when he is held captive in the confines of the home because of his injury, that, from Fai’s perspective, they are happiest together.10 Happy Together has a complex use of color scheme, alternating between full color and black and white, and the film uses both color scheme and music to denote the change in Fai’s emotional state before and after this period.11 The sequence at the start of the film, in which Fai and Po-wing first break up on their trip to the Iguazu Falls, is shot in black and white. This coloration is carried over to Buenos Aires, where, as a doorman at Bar Sur, Fai is shown to be impatient when taking photographs for a group of tourists (figure 4.3), chucking the cam- era in the tour guide’s hands with the words, “Fuck it,” as live tango music spills out from the bar. After he starts over with Po-wing following the lat- ter’s injury, the film switches into full-color mode. In a similar sequence, now shot in color, Fai is clearly in good spirits, smiling while patiently tak- ing photographs for a tour group (figure 4.4). Set to the extra-diegetic