Happy Together

Happy Together (1997) follows two men who travel from Hong Kong to Argentina. Lai and Ho go to Buenos Aires to rebuild their relationship, fight and separate on the way, and neither can raise the money to get home. The film shows the cycle of breaking up and starting again over and over. Wong Kar-wai chose Buenos Aires deliberately, as the antipode of Hong Kong. The characters looking for the furthest possible point from home is the film's entire geography. Christopher Doyle shot it. In Derek Elley's phrase he is the real star of the film; the grainy high contrast image defines how it looks. Some passages are black and white, others saturated, and the transitions are never explained. It was released deliberately before Hong Kong's handover to China on 30 June 1997 and connected directly with an audience living in uncertainty about what was coming. Wong won Best Director at Cannes in 1997 for it, his first major international award, and it carried him out of the art house circuit into international recognition. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai lead. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: Wong Kar-wai, visually dense cinema, and stories about separation. Less good for: the structure is circular and does not progress; the same fight recurs several times. The relationship runs on mutual attrition and is wearing to watch. The Iguazu Falls motif reads as too legible a symbol for some.