This paper offers an analysis on the scene starts from 1:19:21 to 1:20:04 in Wong Kar-Wai’s film Happy Together, focusing on its cinematography. This scene exemplifies skillful use of cinematography techniques such as point of view and camera distance which convey the character’s mental state. In this scene, Fai intends to forget about Bo-wing by working in the abattoir, but still he runs into Bo-wing’s shadows when he is trying to wash the blood off the floor.

This scene starts with subjective point of view and a long shot showcasing the environment and Fai’s relationship to it. Fai, standing on his own in a abattoir room, tries to wash off a large animal blood stain with a water pipe on his hands. On the right side of the image, three co-workers are chatting on the street, chilling after the regular working hours. The white column divides the space on scene into two, placing Fai in his solitude. As Fai’s voice-over goes, “As I want to get out of the room, I work overtime shifts at the abattoir.” Fai is working overtime here to escape his memory of Bo-wing and all those harms Bo-wing left in those memories. Fai dominates most of the space on screen, comparing to the three anonymous co-workers who only occupy a fraction of the space on the right side of the column. This spatial composition is an embodiment of Fai’s mental state of inescapable sorrow into visual representation.

Then, the second shot from another angle, also starting with long shot, uses camera movement to transit the focus from Fai to the blood stain on the floor. In this process of transition, we can clearly see a stream of water, guided by Fai’s hands, continuously fall onto the blood stain, scattering the blood outwards. Fai’s voice-over continues, “Po-wing’s words still get to me, but this time I won’t let them.” The third shot is a close up focuses on Fai’s face, showcasing his numb facial expressions. Obviously, he is staring at the blood stain that he is cleaning at the moment, but he seems so careless as if he is letting the stream of water take its own course. What is on his mind?

With a reverse shot(or eye-line match) guided by the direction of Fai’s line of sight, the camera transits into an objective point of view of Fai staring at the blood stain on the floor. Though the stream of water pushes the blood outward, the stickiness of the blood keeps sustaining itself the way is was. This act of cleaning the blood stain with water is meaningless, since the stain is simply too sticky to be removed by the flash of water. However, from the non-stop stream of water we can tell that Fai is still clinging on to this move, as if he can actually get rid of the stain, or metaphorically Bo-wing, in the end. This is a hopeless wish of course, since the blood stain will come back over and over again. Besides, the speed of this shot is reduced to show the first person experience of Fai. In Fai’s subjective experience, time is decelerated as all those happy memories with Bo-wing flashes in front of the eyes of his mind. The last seven seconds of this shot is suddenly blurred, possibly done by a decrease of camera focus length, that nothing can be clearly identified on scene. This implies that Fai bursts into tears at the moment so that he can no longer see.

Overall, this is an allegorical scene perfected by cinematography. Fai tries to escape his room, in which everything remind him happy time together with Bo-wing, by killing time at the abattoir. Fai tries to persuade himself to forget about Bo-wing when washing the blood stain, but the faded memory comes back to him again, covering his heart with sorrow, just as the currents of the blood covers the floor over and over again. This scene is highly dependent on cinematography techniques. Different camera distances along with camera movements successfully shift the focus between environment and different subjects flexibly, and the change of point of view together with shot/reverse shot demonstrates the mental states of Fai, aligning us with him and his emotions.

This short but stunning scene points to the key theme of this film: unity and happiness. Though Bo-wing is not visually present in this scene, his presence takes the form of the blood stain and continuously affects Fai’s consciousness. If happiness is togetherness, or unity, the structure of the very mental representation of happiness always occurs in the form of “1+”. In this sense, the seemingly fugitive action to forget an object actually demonstrates the underlying impulsion of being in unity with that object. Fai, trying to forget his deep longing for the long-gone unity together with Bo-wing, only finds himself caught up in the whirl of such dissolving past of happiness, just as the blood intertwine with the endless stream of water until we can no long distinguish one from the other...