Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Happy Together
1997 · Wong Kar-Wai · Happy Together on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the lamp with a photograph of Iguazu Falls on its shade. (setting)
This small domestic object recurs early in the apartment, showing an image of a place the two men keep talking about visiting.
Payoff: A picture on a lamp keeps a destination present in the room as something they talk about and cannot touch.
Watch how tightly the wide-angle lens presses faces and bodies into the frame's edges. (camera)
Christopher Doyle shoots the apartment, kitchen, and bar corridor in extreme physical closeness, distorting the space around the two men.
Payoff: The visual closeness exaggerates how near their bodies are even when they cannot connect emotionally.
Notice the film switching between color and black and white. (light)
Richly saturated color and desaturated black and white alternate throughout, roughly tracking periods of intimacy against periods of separation.
Payoff: Color itself becomes a signal for the emotional state of the relationship at any given moment.
Watch what parts of Buenos Aires the film actually shows you. (setting)
The wide boulevards and famous river views are mostly withheld, leaving cramped interiors, dim corridors, and working-class kitchens as the film's real geography.
Payoff: Deleuze calls a space stripped of its role as a setting for action and left as pure feeling an any-space-whatever, and this city becomes exactly that. In the reading: espace quelconque. Buenos Aires stripped of its landmarks and reduced to cramped rooms is what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever.
Listen for the tango and the one a cappella folk song that interrupts it. (sound)
Astor Piazzolla's tango recurs through turbulent passages, while Caetano Veloso's unaccompanied rendition of Cucurrucucu Paloma arrives once, in a single unadorned sequence.
Payoff: The bare, solo song stands apart from everything else on the soundtrack, marking a moment the film treats as singular.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the lamp with the waterfall photograph on it. The destination sits in the room the whole time.