Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, two of Hong Kong's biggest stars, play a pair of gay lovers living out the waning days of their relationship as expatriates in Buenos Aires. Together with Australian Christopher Doyle, Kar-Wai's longtime cinematographer, the director discovers a city rich with diverse cultural influences. Happy Together reveals a corner of the world alive with intimate colors and an astonishing array of sounds. Even more striking, though, is the way that such an international collaboration begins to life a romance that is both realistic and universal. Ho and Lai are characters who are instantly identifible, who play the roles and experience the dynamics that all couples go through in the course of a relationship. Lusty tango bars, the salsa music of the La Boca sidewalks and the hypnotic vision of the nearby Igauzu Falls gives further dimension to the tensions growing between the two lovers.

Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express, Fallen Angels) has made with Happy Together his most accomplished work: A modern film, made by an auteur with a distinctive signature, which contains equal amounts of cinematic beauty and penetrating drama. Here, Kar-Wai has crafted a rare art film that cements his international reputation as a world-class director.

Thwarted love forms the main theme of Happy Together, a film which convincingly portrays an inequitable couple, one bratty and flighty, one dependable but slightly tedious. Leslie Cheung's brilliant performance as the emotionally fragile and unstable half of the couple, Ho Po-wing, is made all the more tragic by his subsequent suicide in April 2003. Tony Leung's repressed, agonised turn as the other, more grounded half, Lai Yiu-fai, is equally moving and utterly persuasive. The film's intense focus on its two leads, frequently in scenes with little or no dialogue, makes great demands on its actors, but Cheung and Leung meet the challenge to stunning effect.

Beautifully shot and lit, the film vividly evokes the experiences of the Chinese Diaspora in Buenos Aires. Wong Kar-wai matches the pace of his film to that of his story, and the film never allows itself to hurry ahead, lingering over the everyday details of the two men's lives, from street football matches to bus and boat journeys. The film opens with a disastrous pilgrimage to the Iguazu Falls, and a stunning aerial shot of the Falls is used twice in the film at length to mirror the emotional turmoil and maelstrom the two lovers are experiencing...

Instead of spreading the story over an ensemble of characters, Wong Kar-Wai focuses on the tedious and repetitious relationship between Lai and Ho, which is typical of any married couple, a perspective that most viewers will appreciate, whether gay or straight. The casting is daring with two of Hong Kong's brightest straight actors, Tony Leung (who also starred in "Chungking Express") and Leslie Cheung ("Farewell My Concubine", and co-starred with Leung in Wong Kar-Wai's "Ashes of Time"), as a homosexual couple, which would be the equivalent of casting John Travolta and Nicholas Cage in a gay film. Lai Yiu-Fai (Leung) and Ho Po-Wing (Cheung) are a couple of ex-patriates living together in Buenos Aires. However, after an aborted trip to see the Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil, a symbol of renewal that is touched upon throughout the film, they drift apart. Lai becomes a doorman at a tango club, which pays enough for him to maintain a claustrophobic flat in a rundown building. Meanwhile, Ho sells himself out as a hustler, making a living off of a series of one-night stands. However, after finding Ho bleeding on the street, beaten up by a 'bad trick', Lai decides to take Ho back in an attempt to 'start over', and finally make the trip to Iguazu.

HT exhibits many of the hallmarks inherent in all of Wong Kar-Wai's films. The story, rather than being plot-driven, is theme-driven, with many layers of interpretation. Every aspect of the story, whether it be characters, the occupations of the characters, or even where they stand in a room, speaks to hidden metaphors and subtext. His characters are usually divided into two camps with opposing philosophies, and this is seen in the contrast between Lai and Ho. Lai, the more reserved and responsible of the two, is haunted by the past and is blinded to opportunities in the present by the haze of nostalgia. Ho, the more petty of the pair, has a shiftless life without any 'memory' of the past, which leads to a meaningless existence and the need to define his own purpose through his relationships with others. This same juxtaposition was seen between Yuddy and the cop in "Days of Being Wild", and the Hitman and Michelle in "Fallen Angels".

The images that Wong Kar-Wai and his ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in HT are, as usual, stunning. Using the same techniques employed in "Fallen Angels", where the luminance of the image was boosted through the use of high-contrast film, Wong Kar-Wai creates a dizzying array of richly-textured shots. Those familiar with his films will see the usual indulgences-- the sped-up footage of city traffic, the arty and introspective slo-mo, the MTV-school-of-film-making, the long monologues, the shifting points-of-view, and the Godardian influences of jump-cutting and iconography (the fixation on stationary objects, such as clocks, street signs, and statues)-- all of which speak to the themes common to all Wong Kar-Wai films: the transiency of relationships, the introspective point-of-view, and the persistence of memory.

"Happy Together" is a straightforward narrative with the existential philosophy and the stylish-camera work toned-down, which made it an average Wong Kar-Wai film. The exhilaration of watching his films comes from fitting together the pieces of a 90-minute intellectual puzzle, and subsequent viewings generally revealed new interpretations and nuances. Though the film had a few moments of brilliance, the combination of leisurely pacing without the trademark eye- and brain-candy made it difficult to sit through-- there was just not enough mystery and mysticism to make it one of his better films.

Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing) move from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires to start over. The film opens with them making love in a fashion at once tender and desperate, and soon enough they break up again over an aborted road trip to see the famous Iguazu Falls. Lai goes to work as a doorman at a tango bar, and must endure the sight of Ho coming and going most nights with a different man. However, when Ho is badly beaten, Lai takes him in. The two start over again, with inevitable results. As Lai sums it up, "I had no regrets until I met you. Now my regrets could kill me."

It's a beautiful and mesmeric film. Australian-born Christopher Doyle's cinematography is exquisite, and uses a wide mix of mediums, from black-and-white to video to 16mm to grainy colour to still frames and back again. It sounds messy, but the result draws you effortlessly into the misfiring emotions of Lai and Ho's world, so much so that after a while you fail to notice exactly when the colour comes and goes.

There's not a great deal of plot, which is the point; humans are unpredictable creatures, particularly in love, and life rarely runs neatly. It leaves the actors plenty of space, and Tony Leung picked up the Best Actor award at the 1998 Hong Kong Film Awards. His character's journey defines the film, and it's ultimately a hopeful one. The credits roll to the tune of the Turtles song "Happy Together", and you'll be still humming it for weeks afterward.