Crossing Borders and Breaking Boundaries: A Comparison of the Films Happy Together (1997) and The Edge of Heaven (2007)

Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997) and The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007) are two films that depict characters in intimate relationships that include geographical mobility. Though that is just one of the similarities they share, the two films reveal different attitudes toward life and death. The Edge of Heaven educates its audience through fear by portraying innocent people dying, while Happy Together could be interpreted more as a national allegory, given the depiction of a historical figure’s death. Nonetheless, the aim of this research is to argue that the two films are similar in that they both tell tales about revealing the experiences of moving across borders and living in cosmopolitan places. Moreover, the characters in both films expect a change in the boundaries between people and wish for a new cosmopolitan world.