There is a shot towards the end of Happy Together—no spolier—where somebody is seen from afar through a long lens. The camera is spinning around him making the background move fast behind and creating an attractive effect. Having found particular favour among action directors in recent years and being the environment I work in more knowledgeable on such films than, say, Hong Kong independent ones, I had always heard this referred to as the Michael Bay shot. It is therefore with unspeakable relief that I feel now allowed to call it—at least in private, not to sound snobbish—the Wong Kar-wai shot.
Regardless of Happy Together having actual primacy in the use of telephoto tracking—I have no idea and couldn’t care less—one of the many aspects it fascinated me for is how the camera language is inventively explored without ever letting the narrative be upstaged by pure aesthetic choices. This results in a superbly composed visual storytelling that follows the characters along their emotional turmoils, and us with them.
In Happy Together the force of nature looms in the form of longing and distant memories over the tiny, dimly lit urban spaces in which its animal souls wander. Steamy kitchens, shabby flats, smokey locals, and narrow streets is where life gets caged, or where to tango steps it gets poisoned with passion.

To see its title in capitals on a cinema letterboard is something special that keeps me for a minute although I’m late. I wonder how it felt to compose it from the top of a ladder one letter at a time—I am sure up close they are bigger than one would imagine.
Moments later I take a pew in my favourite seat right in the middle, at a distance dictated by my shortsighted eyes. The seats, the walls, the curtains—everything seems redder tonight. I don’t even know if that’s the dominant colour of the screening room but so it is in my memory as I try to write something about it.
Whatever spell brought In the Mood for Love to the end of its troubled production is the same I am put under as the beautiful Cantonese text card appears on screen, and subtitled I read—Hong Kong 1962.
The first part of the film is paced by intimate angles, slow motion scenes, the music masterfully alternating a seducing waltz and a couple of Nat King Cole’s suave Latin detours. Wong Kar-wai’s love for his characters is palpable and contagious—we are soon in love too. Framed by claustrophobic urban interiors and narrow city corners, life flows almost unseen, muffled behind misted windows, steamy kitchens, the pouring rain. I wonder if Saul Leiter was ever a reference or an inspiration. The second part takes a different tone as if dried up by stranded feelings, secrets too long kept, or simply time. Reality brutally interferes. Dreams become memories. What wasn’t said will stay unheard forever.