Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997): Prince Charles Cinema, 2.45pm
This 4K presentation is on an extended run at the Prince Charles. Details here.
Chicago Reader review:
A
star vehicle, not only because its leads were two of the hottest stars
in Hong Kong cinema (Tony Leung and the late Leslie Cheung) and a
Taiwanese pop star (Chang Chen, who played the 14-year-old hero of
Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day),
but also because writer-director Wong Kar-wai is something of a star
himself. In fact his aggressive mannerist style—the use of different
characters as narrators, the variable speed of Chris Doyle's frenetic
cinematography, the shifts between color and black and white—forms the
core of this 1997 story of doomed love between two men in Buenos Aires,
one of whom befriends a straight Taiwanese youth in the same city.
Structurally and dramatically this is all over the place, but
stylistically it's gripping, and thematically it suggests an oblique
response to the end of Hong Kong's colonial rule. Incidentally, a friend
of mine from Buenos Aires tells me that this film captures that city
better than any other.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
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