Film Analysis - Wong Kar-Wai's film world(Happy Together)

Wong Kar-wai, BBS (born 17 July 1956) is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylised, emotionally resonant work, including Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), 2046 (2004) and The Grandmaster (2013). His film In the Mood for Love (2000), starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, garnered widespread critical acclaim. Wong's films frequently feature protagonists who yearn for romance in the midst of a knowingly brief life and scenes that can often be described as sketchy, digressive, exhilarating, and containing vivid imagery.

                                 ——Film History: An Introduction (3rd ed. ed.)

Wong Kar-wai is a very famous Chinese director. I don't want to introduce him too much, this is Wikipedia's introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wong_Kar-wai   audiences can know him from the website.

The film I want analysis, or I should say study here, is Happy Together(1997). It's a story about two gay lovers live abroad. It is a very simple story, this film's Chinese name means: spring scenery has burst into bloom. Wong Kaer-Wai has gained the Best Director Award of Cannes Film Festival in 1997.

These two man love each other very deeply. They always decide to do something exhilarating together. However, because of their different character,they thought other side is suspicious. They were quarreling with each other usually...

There always have many emotion changing in Wong Kar-Wai's film. He use the way of voice-over and subtitle to show the emotion of character, too. In the other hand, he has a lot of other methods to show character's emotion(include inner world emotion) in his film. As I observed, the most important and useful two methods are:

1. Poetic

Not only poetic characters in the film, but also poetic dialogue, heading, subheading, subtitle, character's action, film scenes, voice-over, music, even weather that day.

Wong Kar-Wai just like a poet. In his eyes, everything can be poetic. Maybe the character's emotion has changed. Wong Kar-Wai did not show the character's changing. He just filmed the cataract for 40 seconds with a special music. After watch 40 seconds "poem", some audiences will love this director's filming skill, someone will stand up and leave cinema straightway.

2. Special picture

The pictures in Wong Kar-Wai's film always very beautiful. However, it's different with other directors. I believe Wong Kar-Wai has a very high requirement to his cameraman. He prefer to use handheld shooting, so cameraman need to stand and hold the camera all the time. He prefer to use full length shot, so cameraman often need to change the focus on the moving character.

He is a very stringent director. His film always work several years, many pictures will be cut if he don't like. Just like the picture above, we cannot find it in the movie because director think it's not useful to story...