90s Hong Kong anti-romance.
Lai Yiu-Fai is in a toxic relationship with using waster Ho Po-Wing. The film begins with them ‘starting over’ from a previous break-up with passionate sex and a holiday to Argentina, only to instantly dissolve into yet another break-up once they arrive, while getting lost looking for a waterfall beauty spot. The rest of the film is Lai Yiu-Fai working various boring and low-paid jobs to raise the money to get back home, while Ho Po-Wing shows up intermittently to get food, shelter, money and sex.
It’s good, the dialogue is natural, very much the childish, petty bickering of long-term relationships where you’re doing each other’s head in. They are both 20-somethings and while they’ve both slept with other people, you are left with the feeling that this is the first relationship they’ve had that really meant something to them. Because of that, they call it love, but they barely like one another.
Both the scenes of separation and scenes of reunion ache with loneliness. Lai Yiu-Fai drinks and chain-smokes and hands out flyers for bars and takes pictures of tourists and lies in a flea pit lodging-house and day after day is the same. Just the mindless churn of empty existence. When Ho Po-Wing shows up, there is at least some excitement. It’s usually the bad excitement, pure chaos, and it doesn’t actually make Lai Yiu-Fai feel good, but it breaks the monotony. The rolling fights which barely even resolve into peace anymore before moving onto the next – at least they are about Lai Yiu-Fai. They are about him, and the only place in his life where he is not just a nameless face, replaceable by any other.
And yet being in a relationship with Ho Po-Wing leaves him almost as lonely as being alone. Ho Po-Wing doesn’t make him feel loved, or wanted, or held. He shows up drunk wanting sex, lies around smoking and watching tv while Lai Yiu-Fai works, and demands his dinner cooked for him even when Lai Yiu-Fai is sick in bed. Yet despite all this, Lai Yiu-Fai hides Ho Po-Wing’s passport, desperate to keep him in his life.
The film ends with the couple separated again, and Lai Yiu-Fai, although miserable and lonely, starts to form a friendship with a guy from his work, and reaches out to his estranged father. He visits the waterfall they tried to find at the start of the film, and laments “there should be two of us here”. Ironically it is at the point where he feels the worst that he makes the best decisions. Not sinking all his need for connection into this one other person, he reaches out to build friendships, to try to mend bonds with family, and to open his eyes to the beauty of the world around him and the life he has which can be filled with those things.
Using slice-of-life storytelling, Happy Together is a portrait of loneliness both in and out of romantic relationships. With plenty of humour in the mundane, it is an enjoyable watch even as the characters push and pull at each other for something deeper that neither can articulate.