Synopsis
Happy Together (春光乍洩, 1997) is Wong Kar-wai's aching romance, free to watch online on iFILM. Two men from Hong Kong, Lai and Ho, fly to the far side of the planet, to Buenos Aires, hoping to rescue whatever is left of them. They have a line for every breakup: let's start over.
So they break up and start over, again and again. Leslie Cheung's Ho is charming and faithless, drifting back only when he's hurt. Tony Leung's Lai waits, saves for a ticket home, and works the door of a tango bar. Hovering over it all is the Iguazu waterfall they never reach together, a shabby rented room, and long Argentine nights that never seem to end. Leung broke through internationally here, and cinematographer Christopher Doyle shoots the city in scorched color one moment and cold black-and-white the next.
The film handed Wong Kar-wai the Best Director prize at Cannes in 1997, the first Hong Kong filmmaker to win it. It runs on feeling rather than plot: longing, jealousy, the impossibility of staying and the impossibility of leaving. If In the Mood for Love wrecked you, this one will too. Stream Happy Together (1997) online on iFILM.
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