Happy Together

Few films capture the volatility of love as vividly as Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, which makes it the ideal starting point for our new series of Queering Cinema, Longing/Belonging. Set in the disorienting vastness of Buenos Aires, the film follows two lovers caught in a cycle of separation and return. With its lush cinematography and aching performances, the film becomes a meditation on exile, intimacy, and the fragile hope of beginning again. A landmark of queer cinema, it reminds us that love can be both sanctuary and storm. — Fay Nass, Queering Cinema curator

The most thoughtful and philosophically rewarding of [Wong’s] films.

Richard Williams, The Guardian

Happy Together is a volatile drama of perpetual stylistic unrest, subjecting its audience to a barrage of vibrant, restless imagery cut into jagged, disorienting fragments. Even now – after two decades of hyper-stylised cinema, advertising and music videos that have pushed the boundaries of aesthetic flashiness to the point of numbing sensory excess – Wong’s dynamic postmodern spectacle still holds the power to overwhelm and challenge audiences.

David Pountain, Little White Lies