Lan Yu (Stanley Kwan) 2001 / Happy Together (Wong
Kar-Wai) 1997
Perhaps even mentioning Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together
in this review suggests my cinematic knowledge doesn’t span as broadly as it
should, but there’s no getting around it for me, especially since I imagine
the majority of people who see both films will make the same, obvious
connection. As far as gay-themed Chinese melodrama goes, Stanley Kwan’s Lan
Yu can’t get out form under Happy Together’s shadow. On the plus
side, it’s a bit more explicitly sexual than Wong’s film, which was chaste
to a fault after its opening scene, but it’s also far, far less stylish, which
hurts the most, since it’s barely any more deep or emotionally resonant. In Happy
Together, the visuals made the film come alive, and made concrete the
dislocation that the main characters felt from their surroundings and each
other. Instead of using dialogue, that movie communicated the majority of its
ideas and feelings through its images, and created an intimate visual essay
about the mood swings of a love affair. Wong’s Godardian influences come out
more strongly here than in any of his other films, and the effect is at once
dazzling, and slightly more remote than his usual work.
If Happy Together borrowed most of its stylistic
trademarks from the French Nouvelle Vague, Kwan’s film feels mostly just
vague. The time span of Lan Yu spans several years, but the scenes are
arranged so we barely notice. Both movies use time in this manner (though Happy
Together takes place over a more compressed period), as the two lovers at
their centers drift randomly into and out of each others’ lives, but where Happy
Together makes this temporal confusion reflect its leads’ on-again,
off-again feelings toward each other, in Lan Yu, it seems a more obvious
plot device. Lan Yu is also much more talky than Happy Together,
so instead of visual poetry, we get lame-brained dialogue, such as the scene in
which one sullen character explains his failed attempt to try to photograph a
rainbow. Though there’s nothing insanely deep said in Happy Together either,
but by leaving so much unsaid Wong doesn’t make the mistake of stultifying his
characters’ relationship with this sort of lousy dialogue. The saving grace of
Lan Yu, which keeps it from descending into a trite series of vignettes,
is the relative naïveté of its titular character. Since the film’s being
told loosely from the perspective of a romantic neophyte, it forces the audience
to be a bit more accepting of the obvious.
In Happy Together, the characters seem to have full
knowledge that their relationship is ultimately doomed, but they continue onward
nonetheless, giving the film a quixotic feel that it can’t shake as its lovers
tango back and forth during their Argentinean escapade. The protagonists of Lan
Yu are disappointingly practical in comparison, and I can’t imagine their
predicament really inspiring anyone, even if Kwan attempts to parallel the ups
and downs of their involvement with the rise of Capitalism in Mainland China.
Kwan could have certainly used here some of the idealism that thrived even in
the worst of circumstances in Happy Together. As such it’s a bit more
dour and pessimistic than it really has any right to be, especially since it
doesn’t really work as a lamentation, despite its mournful opening narration.
Though the acting’s just fine in Lan Yu, the cast
can’t compare to the star power that Leung and Cheung projected in Wong’s
film. Their scenes together weren’t romantic so much as romanticized by
Wong’s style. Kwan takes the opposite approach, hoping that the endearing
qualities of his characters will help us overlook the relatively mundane way
that he’s chosen to film his movie, but there’s no good humor or extenuating
circumstance here that makes us love these characters, and the movie feels a bit
undercooked as a result. Lan Yu is certainly a serviceable melodrama, but
it doesn’t even try for the greatness that Happy Together shoots for
(and misses). Like most real life relationships, the conservative constancy that
Lan Yu provides is far less interesting that the self-destructive passion
that fuels Happy Together.
