Happy Together

In the organizer's words:

Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai, two young men, travel from Hong Kong to Argentina and diagnose the end of their love there. They break up, get back together, break up again, live together again for a while and then break up for good: a long farewell. Not an unusual story, banal in its almost everyday pathos, but nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of this, suitable for big pictures. Wong Kar-Wai, director of the widely acclaimed CHUNG-KING EXPRESS, has found such images and put them together in a generous, lyrical panorama. It celebrates the beauty of the no-longer-intact, the scrapped and the cheap glamor. The ambience appears precious, ennobled by the sadness of broken hearts. The aesthetic revaluations of the inherently unattractive do not appear as decorative ingredients of camp chic, but as a mood that has become an image. Wong Kar-Wai takes inviting photographs of a cursed doss house and gains nostalgic charm from a desolate street corner in Buenos Aires. The small, shabby and oppressive is transformed into poetry under his gaze. A neglected communal kitchen becomes the dance floor of a longing tango, a kitsch bitch with a painted waterfall becomes a sacred object, a symbol of the place of longing for shared love. (epdFilm)

HAPPY TOGETHER shows love in the phase in which everything is actually already over, but in which - nourished by the pain and hurt of the lovers - it appears at its strongest. It is not the days of happy togetherness, but the agony of separation that distinguishes one relationship from the many others and makes it appear greater or more important in retrospect. The film traces this with impressive intensity. (Spiegel)

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