Watch a video exploring the similarities between ‘Moonlight’ and the films of Wong Kar-wai

The side-by-side comparisons reveal how much director Barry Jenkins was influenced by the Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker

Like countless other film geeks, we were struck by how many references were made in Moonlight to the movies of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai. In particular, Moonlight‘s director Barry Jenkins seemed to pay a pronounced homage to Wong Kar-wai’s queer love story Happy Together – the films even share a music sync: Caetano Veloso’s Cuccurucucu Paloma.  

We’re not the only ones to have spotted this clever piece of intertextuality, film buff Alessio Marinacci has created a video placing shots of Moonlight side-by-side with shots taken from Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and Days of Being Wild. You can watch the fan-made video above.

Interestingly, Moonlight’s director Jenkins commented on his use of Cuccurucucu Paloma in an interview with Pitchfork:

It’s a direct homage. Even the way we framed the car driving down the highway is the same. I remember watching Happy Together a long time ago. It was the first movie I would say that I saw that was outright a queer film. One of the first films I saw that had subtitles, even. Moonlight is worlds away from Happy Together—it’s a movie about two Asian men living in Argentina, and here we have these two black men from fucking Liberty City, Miami. The world is very big and also very small, because they’re experiencing the same things. I feel like film has given so much to me and I just wanted for 30 seconds to show how small the world is. 

(via The Film Stage)