In high school freshman biology class I asked a question that exposed my ignorance of all things sexual. After having seen so many Hollywood movies in which lovers always seemed to click, I asked a teacher why everyone didn't take the same amount of time to reach orgasm . "Everyone is different," she said.

And that is the ultimate truth of relationships. Rarely are two people in synch. But when it does happen, it's amazing. Perhaps that's what makes Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together such an amazing movie. It highlights the fact that we are rarely in synch with each other.

The plot of the film is relatively simple. Lai Yiu Fai (Tony Leung) and Ho Po Wing (Leslie Cheung) are lovers in a tumultuous relationship. But they are passionate when they are together. Getting away from Hong Kong which is on the verge of its historic repossession by the Chinese government from British rule, they end up in Buenos Aires . As they search for Igazu Falls, they end up angering each other, and Wing breaks it off. "Maybe sometime we can start again," he says, as they so often do. But Fai has had enough of stopping and starting and this time, he's tired of all the games (even though he plays them too).

Fai takes a job as a doorman at a tango bar, and Wing turns to a life of hustling. Their paths cross again, and when Fai sees Wing's new lifestyle, he is destroyed. But their paths continue to cross until a violent client breaks Wing's hands, and Fai takes him in. Eventually they become lovers again, but Fai still cannot stand Wing's waywardness and coyness. Fai eventually kicks out Wing. Fai finds a new job at a restaurant and befriends a young boy named Cheng (Chan Cheng), who has the distinguishing characteristic of having very good hearing. As Fai has reached a low point, the youth's enthusiasm brings him to a better place, though he is filled with melancholy and a longing to make good with his family. Fai, to quell these desires, starts having sex in anonymous bathrooms and porno theaters, something he thought only Wing does. Eventually, Fai makes a third effort to find Igazu Falls, and this time succeeds. Then he returns to Hong Kong, where he makes a short stop at the the Cheng family 's market. Fai sees Cheng's picture and at last feels confident that he can visit his old friend, though his relationship with his own family remains rocky.

Simply put, that's the story of the film: Two lovers break up, try to get back together, and fail miserably. This is the flip side of Sunrise . As Sunrise told the story of a married couple that survived their differences and boredoms, Happy Together suggests a sense of alienation and difficulty in all relationships of getting into synch together. As is the case in most of the time with Wing and Fai, they are never able to bend to the other's need until it is too late. They both want to make each other happy, but not for the sake of their individualism and their pride.

The film is also similar to Sunrise in that it is just as visually brilliant. Christopher Doyle, who has collaborated with Wong Kar-Wai on all but one of his films, has formed a partnership that brings the best out of both of them. Doyle's great saturated look can be done for other directors (his color work on Van Sant's Psycho almost makes that film worth watching), but it is his partnership with Wong Kar-Wai that stands as one of the great collaborations in modern cinema. Doyle and Wong have described their technique as the Fat Man's Feet: you really don't know how you got to the place you end up at until the end of the day when you finally get home and take off your shoes. It is hard to imagine how they got what they got out of Happy Together with that looseness, but as with Tsui Hark and his work, there is great method to this madness, and somehow something brilliant comes out of it.

Wong Kar-Wai's films always have short running times (he rarely makes films that run over 100 minutes), but they always feel long. Maybe this is bad, as films should rarely feel long, but in retrospect you can't find one thing that rings false or seems unnecessary. The jangly nature of this film says it is created by a filmmaker who is recreating how to make film (only his first film, As Tears go By, has the most linear structure). The problem most young filmmakers have in trying to tell new stories is they end up using old formats, those they find or have been exposed to on television and film. What makes Wong Kar-Wai so special is that he succeeds brilliantly in changing the very form of film, while still telling a story that has a structure, but without resorting to conventional methods of "sympathy." His films reinvent the form.

Someone told me that he feels that Wing and Fai are not particularly sympathetic. I disagree. To be unsympathetic is to be one-dimensional. I don't think anything could be further from the truth. Though both Wing and Fai have their dark sides—they are violent, get drunk, are passive aggressive, manipulative, and whiny—they also are caring, friendly, and above all human, and it is their faults that makes them so tragically human. That they cannot connect is what makes them two dimensional. This isn't like George Clooney and Michele Pfieffer hugging in a fountain, with money to spare and their only problems in life being unable to time things right. Wing and Fai can get the sex right—it's everything else that's fucked up. For example, Fai shows up at Wing's drunk and ready to kill him. But behind this is the love and fear that he feels as he sees Wing at his lowest. WIng is a fickle person. He wants love, but he doesn't want to be tied down. Fai is passive aggressive. He likes being the disciplinarian and likes to complain. He'd rather lay down the law then forget about things, rather have the truth than love. Fai says he was happiest with Wing when Wing's hands were broken and asleep. He wants Wing as his prisoner, and can only function in the relationship when he can have Wing to himself, and perhaps that is why they went to Beunos Aires in the first place. Fai will love him, but doesn't want to change. But once Fai has left, Wing finally gives himself up, but he knows it is too late. Anyone who doubts Wong Kar-Wai's sympathy for these characters should watch Wing's tear-filled clutching of Fai's blanket as he knows that Fai is gone. Or Fai's breakdown into Cheng's tape recorder as he tries to express his sadness.

I could go on, but it seems fair to mention Wong Kar-Wai's brilliant use of sound. He uses a couple of Zappa tunes, and some Piatzolla tangos to capture various moods perfectly, perhaps better than anyone has used music to show something on screen before. A shot of Fai floating on a boat as the tango music, which has become entangled with his love life and the games played, strikes such a passionately sad note as to induce tears in the most skeptical viewer. I can understand why people would not like this film—it is not safe, it does not obey the rules that cinema has laid down for us, it has not yet been enshrined as a classic, to which people might look at it and think they had to like it. But its rawness is real, and great.

As this was the 10th time I've watched the film in roughly a year, I have a deep relationship with it. And it keeps getting better and better. The dullness viewers may feel the first time dissipates as one realizes how it is the minutia that makes the film powerful and strong. It is a quiet film.

The first time I watched it I related to one character the most. As I watch it again and again I realize that I have played the games both characters have played. But what I am left with time and time again is that this film understand relationships better than any Hollywood film I have ever seen and almost all other foreign films. It's not a fun happy film, but I wouldn't make that claim of Rules of the Game or The Passion of Joan of Ark, though Happy Together is involving and entertaining, it is not a happy film. Though the title suggests the sledgehammer subtleties of Todd Solondz's melodramatic Happiness (get it, no one's happy), it's a little more intricate a reference to how they try and be happy together, but since they are so alienated from each other in their individualism, they cannot bend to make the other person happy. The struggle to stay happy together, happy in synch, is one of the great struggles of the film, and of life, and if any film can capture one of the great struggles of life, it must be a great work, so I feel no pain suggesting that Happy Together be compared to Rules of the Game, Sunrise, Passion of Joan of Ark, Night of the Living Dead, and Blue Velvet.