ZeGatti

Aw-kommon's notes on "Happy Together" are typical of those who cannot approach a film without aligning it with definite paradigms and secure standards. In this case, the paradigm is "Midnight Cowboy" -- a film that belongs to a totally different genre, was written and shot according to "naturalistic" procedures of Hollywood commercial cinema and, most of all, deals with romance from a quite different perspective. In "Midnight Cowboy" redemption of homoeroticism comes through death, a strategy that was quite revealing of the morals that prevailed at the time the movie was produced. "Happy Together", on the other hand, deals with romance as if it could have been homo-, hetero- or whatever, and even though homoeroticism is such an essential element to the narrative, the protagonists'love affair is a pretext for the emergence of their decentered identities, their search for love and friendship and, most important, it ends on a note of hope of future encounters. All that in a poetic tone, one that demands a continuous esthetic reconstruction, hardly understood (or accepted) by those who are encapsulated in a world of conventional filmmaking.