GAY AND GAUDY

By RICHARD CORLISS

As the major (virtually the only) maker of art films in rampantly commercial Hong Kong, Wong Kar-wai is a goad and a threat to his competitors. He releases a movie--say, the 1990 Days of Being Wild--and they release a parody, Days of Being Dumb. He uses a pensive voice-over narration in Chung-king Express; soon every Hong Kong film hero is talking to himself. He wins the Best Director prize at this May's Cannes festival for Happy Together, and within three months there's a movie (Those Were the Days) about a prizewinning director sent back to the '60s as punishment for never having made a popular picture.

It's tough being the object of all this scornful veneration--so tough that Wong left town, went to the opposite side of the world and made a movie about gay men stranded in Argentina. Yet Happy Together is also a twist on a familiar Hong Kong genre: the Heroic Bloodshed films of John Woo. Instead of making war, Ho (Leslie Cheung) and Lai (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) make love as war. They arouse and annoy each other, fall out of love and back in. When the two aren't arguing, they are folding into each other for shelter from the storm within. The film is full of pathetic hugs and sweet cuddles; the lovers share cigarettes, tango dances, sponge baths and one fabulous kiss in the kitchen. They make each other miserable, yet they are also groping toward the unlikely ideal of being happy together.

With its Kodachrome oranges and petrochemical sunsets, Happy Together looks as if it had been printed on ancient nitrate stock about to catch fire, like the loins of its heroes. Wong's U.S. career could do the same when audiences discover this this sexy, spiky love story.

--R.C.