HAPPY TOGETHER (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)

“Let’s start over”: after each breakup, or in anticipation of an upcoming one, Po-Wing says this to Yiu-Fai. They have done this many times.
     One of his most achingly beautiful films, Chun gwong cha sit brought Wong Kar-Wai the directorial prize at Cannes. It depicts the moody, combustible relationship of two Hong Kong gay lovers visiting Buenos Aires. Tony Leung Chiu Wai, perhaps an actor one cannot imagine playing a homosexual role, is brilliant as the more independent and adaptable of the two, Lai Yiu-Fai, who takes jobs in a tango bar (doorman) and a Chinese restaurant (dishwasher), and eventually finds another partner. Leslie Cheung, six years before his suicide, plays Ho Po-Wing, who suffers most the pair’s final romantic breakup and, on his own, descends into prostitution. Finding Po-Wing on the street beaten up, Yiu-Fai takes him to his apartment in a seedy district but no longer wishes to be his lover. Po-Wing presses. The quick, evanescent style of this heartrending film is keyed to the illusions and sensations, including pop music, of the youthful middle-aged men’s shared and separate lives.
     Separate and together: the film opens with their passports being stamped, followed by photographs of them as a couple.
     Wong plays with different stocks and speeds, and crams in a dazzling array of other experimental techniques—all this, correlative to the fingertip volatility of the central love-match, the way in which Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai play at love and life, partly in an attempt to rekindle and prolong their faded youth. This is a film of car trips and bus rides, going here and going there: the aimlessness of youthful motion. A bus stops, and the sound of this is like a crack of thunder. Percy Bysshe Shelley would have loved this movie.

ISLAND (Pavel Lungin, 2006)

Thirty years ago, in an Orthodox monastery on an island in the White Sea, Father Anatoly is a prophet with a past. During World War II, Anatoly was a sniveling coward who shot his commanding officer under duress from Nazi captors. The captain fell into the sea. Anatoly has devoted his life to God, fearful of the ultimate judgment that awaits him. When he learns 34 years later he did not kill the captain but only injured his arm, he is ready to die. He has a coffin readied and settles in. But all we have seen is a metaphor for the suspended lives of the faithful under Communism.
     At two hours, Ostrov is a long haul. The highly desaturated color, icy vistas, lapping water, the studied monastic life, Anatoly’s miracles, not to mention his impatience with people’s daily lives under Communism when (to his mind) they ought to be giving God and their own spirit highest priority: all this wore me down. There’s also the contrivance of the plot twist. Why not let us in on the fact that the captain doesn’t die that fateful night? Is restricting the prologue to young Anatoly’s perception worth the distortion and trickery? Does God have nothing but contempt for Anatoly’s lifelong suffering?
     It is unusual for a film by Pavel Lungin to be this lackluster; it is also unusual for Lungin to turn to the past. Lungin has been celebrated for having his finger on the pulse of contemporary Russia.
     There is some interest in watching Father Anatoly confront mirroring shards of his experience in the experiences of those who seek him out for advice or spiritual counsel. But in the main this dry film shakes out only a little enlightenment from the burden of Russia’s recent past.