Happy Together
- Mon, Sep 21
The Frida Cinema's seating is first-come, first-serve. For our Midnight Screenings, please plan on arriving by 11:30pm to ensure ample time for parking, picking up concessions, and securing optimal seats. Screening will begin promptly at midnight.
Director: Wong Kar-Wai Run Time: 96 min. Release Year: 1997
Starring: Chang Chen, Gregory Dayton, Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai
This year’s Art House 101 series is concentrating on Global Queer Cinema, and where better to start than a 4K restoration of Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown: Happy Together.
Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung star as a couple traveling through Argentina that are locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy. They break up, make up, and fall apart again and again. Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, when the country’s LGBT community suddenly faced an uncertain future, Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that’s by turns devastating and deliriously romantic.
Shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and luscious saturated color, Happy Together is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that swoons with the ache and exhilaration of love at its heart-tearing extremes.