Happy Together (1997) on Netflix
Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai leave Hong Kong for Argentina to see Iguazu Falls. Lost on the road, they break up, and Fai takes a job at a Buenos Aires tango bar.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.6/1038,913 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai are a couple from Hong Kong whose relationship keeps breaking and mending. A lamp showing Iguazu Falls, bought by Po-Wing for Fai, is the reason they travel to Argentina. On the road to the falls the two get lost, and the relationship falls apart. Fai has no money for a flight home, so he stays in Buenos Aires and takes a job on the door of a tango bar, putting aside what he earns. Po-Wing is often seen by Fai with different men. Fai tells him he has spent all of the money and left him stranded in Argentina.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Happy Together (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Posters for Happy Together showing Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung fully clothed with their legs intertwined were banned from public places in Hong Kong and pulled before the film's release. The producers had also weighed censoring the opening sex scene for certain audiences.
- Wong Kar-wai was already known in art house Chinese cinema for Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express and Ashes of Time, but his Best Director win at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for Happy Together was his first major award and gave him an international spotlight.
- Wong Kar-wai discovered Astor Piazzolla's tango music when he bought the composer's CDs at Amsterdam airport while travelling to Buenos Aires to shoot Happy Together; Piazzolla's songs are used throughout the film.
- The 2006 Russian sitcom Happy Together, itself a remake of Married... with Children, took its name from Wong Kar-wai's film.
- James Laxton, the cinematographer of Moonlight (2016), said Happy Together and In the Mood for Love inspired him to mix natural and ambient light with small warm fill lights and touches of colour, creating a dream-like sense of reality in his own film.
