HAPPY TOGETHER

HAPPY TOGETHER is a title so misleading the director should probably be investigated for false advertising. 

Released between FALLEN ANGELS and IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, this is the Wong Kar-wai film people sometimes treat as secondary, which is strange, because it contains almost everything that makes his cinema hurt so beautifully.

We follow Lai Yiu-fai and Ho Po-wing, a couple from Hong Kong who travel to Argentina and find themselves trapped in the same cycle: breakup, return, damage, apology, repeat. Buenos Aires should offer distance from home, but it only gives their relationship more room to fall apart.

This is Wong at his rawest. The romantic longing is still there, along with the music, the cigarettes, the neon-lit streets, and Christopher Doyle’s restless cinematography. But HAPPY TOGETHER is less polished than the films that later became his calling cards. It’s also lonelier and more emotionally abrasive. The characters don’t glide through heartbreak so much as grind and thrash against it.

Tony Leung gives one of his finest performances as Yiu-fai, exhausted by love and still unable to leave it alone. Leslie Cheung’s Ho Po-wing is charming, cruel, wounded, and impossible to reduce to one thing. Together, they make the relationship feel lived-in rather than symbolic, full of habits, resentments, tenderness, and bad timing.

Wong won Best Director at Cannes for HAPPY TOGETHER, yet the film still sits slightly outside the usual conversation around his work. That’s part of why it’s worth returning to. It’s one of his most direct films about queer love, migration, loneliness, and the fantasy that changing cities might help you become someone else.

It won’t, obviously. But the cinematography is extraordinary.