| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 音樂研究所 === 107 === The troubled male couple Lai Yiu Fai and Ho Po Wing in Happy Together leave Hong Kong in the hope of renewing their liaison, but after a sojourn in Argentina break up again with one returning and one staying behind. In between, Lai befriends the Taiwanese Chang and looks forward to a promising relationship, which leads to the theme song as anticipated in the English title: Happy Together. Giorgio Biancorosso, Emilie Yeh, Chih-Ting Chen and others have contributed to the study of sound and music in films of Wong Kar Wai; based on Michel Chion’s various new concepts on audio-vision and Jeremy Tambling’s discussion on the allegorical in Happy Together, this thesis attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis and selective reading of the film’s sound and music. Firstly, female characters and voices are mostly deleted, highlighting the main theme of homosexuality and its relation to the road movie. Secondly, the flourishing popular music before the hangover of Hong Kong is completely silenced; whether it is Piazzolla’s “nuevo tango,” Cucurrucucú Paloma from Mexico, or Happy Together from the USA, foreign music runs through the film. The loss of the homeland is also the loss of speech. Whereas Lai’s Hong Kong Cantonese and Chang’s Taiwan Mandarin are conversable, communication with fellow Hongkonger Ho is problematic; the latter is also the one among the three without a voice-over of his own. Finally, only when the ambiguously score/diegetic tango invokes an illusory home atmosphere in the rented space, Lai and Ho are “happy together” with a rare “glimmer of spring” (one meaning of the Chinese film title). Likewise, only when the ambiguously score/diegetic Happy Together in Danny Chung’s version invokes an intimate sphere between the headphones of Lai while travelling on the Taipei MRT, the sonic legacy that symbolizes postcolonial Hong Kong “leaks out unexpectedly” at the end of the film. From this perspective, Chang the good listener from Taiwan is the key figure in the allegorization of this film.
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