Happy Together (Wang Kar-wai, 1999)
Plot (as taken from amazon.com): "Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing arrive in Argentina from Hong Kong and take to the road for a holiday. Something is wrong and their relationship goes adrift. A disillusioned Yiu-Fai starts working at a tango bar to save up for his trip home. When a beaten and bruised Po-Wing reappears, Yiu-Fai is empathetic but is unable to enter a more intimate relationship. After all, Po-Wing is not ready to settle down. Yiu-Fai now works in a Chinese restaurant and meets the youthful Chang from Taiwan. Yiu-Fai's life takes on a new spin, while Po-Wing's life shatters continually in contrast."
Reviews:
What's so queer about Happy Together? a.k.a
Queer (N)Asian: interface, community, belonging
by Audrey Yue
Abstract: "This paper attends to the relationship between diasporic media and diasporic queer formation by exploring the cultural circuit of Wong Kar-wai’ s Happy Together (1997) as an agent of diasporic Asian--Australian queer visibility. In particular, it examines how Happy Together interpellates Hong Kong’s first modern Cantopop star, actor and Asian gay icon Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, as an interface for articulating an emerging diasporic Asian queer identity. This interface is a transnational imagination called `Queer (N)Asian’ . `Queer (N)Asian’ expresses how diasporic media interpellates diasporic queer formations."
Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong
Cinema
by Helen Hok-sze Leung
Excerpt: "If you were in Hong Kong during 1997, you might have noticed someone humming the above song. Stanley Kwan depicts this trivial fact of life several times in the film Hold You Tight [Yu huale yu duoluo] (1998), whose title refers to the futile yet intensely desired gesture in “Undercurrent.” This popular song was animated by an undercurrent of anxiety that pervaded Hong Kong since the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. The year 1997, when sovereignty over the territory was to be transferred from British to Chinese hands, became a cultural symbol of fear and apprehension. The feeling that nothing could be “held tight” characterized the political as well as the cultural imaginary of this period of transition. Yet Hong Kong cinema responded to this pervasive milieu of change and uncertainty in a uniquely indirect manner. In the most innovative films of this period, the postcolonial predicament appears at most as an undercurrent, a not-quitevisible force that nonetheless animates what is amply visible on-screen: sex, romance, family conflicts, underworld heroism, teenage gangsters, period drama, martial arts legends, and absurdist humor. It is perhaps appropriate that the anxiety of displacement should itself be endlessly displaced onto an ever-proliferating range of concerns that are contiguous, yet never identical or reducible, to the postcolonial predicament. One of the richest sites of this displacement is that of queer sexuality."