Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
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Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) are two men in love. They consummate with an emotional turbulence, only to part ways, unraveling in the cesspit of sex in public bathrooms, and blowjobs in dark, seedy theaters with people they met five blinks ago. Ho resents monogamy, Lai prefers it.
They travel to Argentina in May 1995, to rid themselves of the boredom of life and being a couple, but part ways there — in the middle of a lonely highway in the blinding monochrome afternoon heat.
Lost and penniless, they drift into and out of each other’s lives in Buenos Aires. Every time they promise to “start over." The city pops up in shots — a glittering city square, the empty seats at a horse race, the steaming, crowded kitchen, the public buses, the terrace next to a port. Lai’s living in a small room where wallpaper and tile merge together, lit by jaundiced light.
Lai works as a doorman at a Tango club at first, to make enough money to get a ticket back to Hong Kong, back home. Chopsticks and a game of Mahjong are remnants of his life back home, like family members playing UNO in foreign towns, or South Indians looking for the first Saravana Bhavan after landing in London. What many would call wasteful traveling, some see as holding onto dregs of the familiar.
Losing the job out of rage, Lai finds himself in a kitchen where he befriends Cheng, whose homosexuality is hinted at. Cheng too is a penniless vagabond in search of the end of the world on which is perched a lighthouse where all despair melts away, and you can walk away renewed, refreshed, happier.
It is the cliché of traveling wedded to the fantasy of getting over someone — that there is one place, one moment when you can just unburden, emerging lighter. Wong Kar-Wai bathes his films in similar motifs of absolution. In The Mood Of Love, you could whisper away your despair into a hole in a tree. In Chungking Express, the pineapple cans housed a similar hope. In Happy Together, South America — the diagonally opposite hemisphere from Hong Kong — serves as the space to explore this. Wong Kar-Wai tilts his camera 180 degrees in a scene to imply this topsy-turvy world where two foreigners seek absolution.
For a long time, for me, South America was what slowly unraveled in geography textbooks — the map of the Amazon snaking through the continent shaped like a spinning top, the Machu Picchu, and the Andes like a jagged interjection. Then slowly when I read Marquez, the dense heat and the colonial hangover in Colombia added depth to the idea. Slowly with cinema, colour was added. Tamil director Shankar shot a song from Enthiran, ‘Kilimanjaro,’ in Machu Picchu of all places. Alejandro González Iñárritu, because of global warming, had to shift the shoot of The Revenant to an archipelago between Chile and Argentina. Dhoom 2 was shot in Brazil — the Copacabana Beach and the imposing statue of Christ The Redeemer. All countries bled into one another by sheer ignorance.
Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together took Argentina out of this blur and made it distinct, colour-corrected foreignness to make one feel how Argentina would make a lonely, lost traveler feel.
The newness of a new country can be architectural — new buildings, new styles of facades, awnings, new heritage; can be linguistic; can be fashion; can be food. But when I visit a new place, the first thing that disorients me is how the sunlight hits differently, and how the sunset makes the sky bleed different shades of red and blue. And sure, there is a science behind it — the tilt of the Earth, the angle of the sun, the intensity of the wind. But all that is forgotten the moment I lay eyes on a colour on the horizon before the sun dips, and a shade of indigo I probably have never seen in my life take shape, and that singular throb of despair is intensified. It is like looking at a Rothko painting, and wondering why suddenly you are moved to tears, or worse, howls.
Instagram filters approximate these differences. Tokyo is seen as a brash exorcizing of colour. New York has a grainy wetness. Jaipur is bleached blue. Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, gives its blue a depth, its green an acidic sheen, and its reds a punch. Much like what Wong Kar-Wai did with the colours in this film — adding acid hues with neon inflections, and suddenly slurping any semblance of colour from the screen. It’s a dizzying array, trying to approximate the arbitrary pungency of memory with the manipulation of colour, shot on film.
When Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai come to Argentina, they buy a lamp whose lampshade is the Iguazu Falls that falls on the border between Argentina and Brazil. They decide to travel there on a whim, but on the way, on the highway, they decide to break up. This seemingly arbitrary desire — to see the Iguazu Falls, to break up — punctuates two ends of the film, because finally, only one of them, Lai, ends up going and seeing the falls, but in that bluster of water, he is rendered alone.
I think of this moment often, because throughout the film we see Lai building selfhood, trying to promise himself that he is enough, that the hustle is enough, that the dignity of labour and languor is enough. But every time Ho comes back to his life, through accident or through intention, he cracks. He succumbs to that creeping human desire (or desperation) to couple up. His jealousy, his insecurity is laid bare. He came to Argentina as one half of a couple, and is leaving alone, he came to the Iguazu Falls as one half of a couple, but arrived alone. In another kind of film, he would have turned back over his shoulders to see if Ho is with him.
But the true tragedy is, at the very end, when Ho Po-Wing is back closer to home in Taiwan, the filters of exposed light and acidic filters that are meant to assert the “other”, the “foreign” remains. Ho Po-Wing goes in search of Cheng and instead finds his loving parents selling sticky rice and fried tofu in a chaotic food-street. He realises that Cheng, for all his wanderlust and watery theories of absolution at the end of the world, has a loving home to come back to. What about Ho Po-Wing?
He notes, with Wong Kar-Wai’s signature stoic sadness, that to be free-spirited like Cheng, one must have a home to return to, to pin up the photos and magnets of our travels. It’s a paradox — that to be free, one has to first be anchored. Ho Po-Wing realises that he has no home. That the whole world is foreign to him. It is by design, then, that throughout the film we never see Hong Kong, Lai’s home. We only hear of it in conversations, hoping to be back there one day, saving up money for that trip, accumulating loneliness that can be punctured once comforted by the familiar. But then perhaps, there is no Hong Kong, no home to rest the weary feet, and everything will always look filtered, lonely, unyielding.
Read more from the What's in a Setting series here.
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