Happy Together [New Restoration] (1997)

Price: $11.99 + taxes and fees

NEW RESTORATION!
This 4K digital restoration was undertaken from the 35mm original camera negative by the Criterion Collection in collaboration with L’Immagine Ritrovata and Jet Tone. It was supervised and approved by Wong Kar Wai.

Bonus Content: Included in your film rental is over two hours of bonus content, including a video essay by TIFF Cinematheque Senior Programmer and world-renowned film expert James Quandt and never-before-seen archival interviews with frequent Wong Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Scroll down to watch.

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Inspired by Wong Kar Wai’s love of Latin American literature, this Cannes Best Director Award winner stars Hong Kong’s two top male heartthrobs, Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, as gay lovers on the lam in Buenos Aires — an audacious bit of casting that Wong likened to a Hollywood film featuring “Tom Cruise sleeping with Brad Pitt.”

“A take-no-prisoners movie from one of Hong Kong’s most idiosyncratic, shoot-from-the-hip filmmakers that’s the very antithesis of sentimental gay love stories.” –The Los Angeles Times

Taking its title from the hit song by The Turtles, Wong’s sixth feature charts the men’s stormy relationship as it ebbs, explodes, resumes, and dies against a backdrop of decaying tenements, backstreets, and seedy tango bars. (The couple’s on-again, mostly off-again affair can be read as an allegory of Hong Kong’s then imminent handover to mainland China.) Wong stakes his all on visual style, employing garish colours and sooty black and white, dense, jagged editing, and artificial effects to heighten the sense of disconnection and desperation.

Content advisory: coarse language