film

Two Hong Kong lovers, a city thousands of miles from home and a relationship that keeps falling apart and coming back together are the ingredients for the HK auteur Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, from 1997. Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung play a volatile couple who travel to the Argentinian capital to try to repair their relationship, and whose efforts to make a new start quickly descend into a familiar cycle of lust, jealousy, tenderness and recrimination. Leung and Cheung are magnetic in perfectly capturing the strange, destructive intimacy of two people who can’t quite live with each other, or without each other.

Shot with restless energy by Christopher Doyle, the film turns Buenos Aires into a dreamy backdrop of lonely streets, cramped apartments and fleeting encounters, culminating in a visit to the spectacular Iguazu Falls. Romantic, messy and often painfully funny, it is an early classic of Wong's brilliant oeuvre.