-Date: 26 July-

Rated: R21

*Only persons aged 21 years old & above (as of screen date) can watch this film.

Presented on the occasion of Heman Chong’s major survey exhibition at Singapore Art Museum, Heman Chong: This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.

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One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar Wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylized portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as 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 LGBTQ community suddenly faced an uncertain future—Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that is by turns devastating and deliriously romantic.

Shot by 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.

(Text credit: The Criterion Collection)

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Heman Chong's Notes on Happy Together:

'Happy Together' was the closing film of the SIFF in 1997. I remember being given two tickets by a friend who had a big fight with his boyfriend, and they weren't in the mood to see the film. In retrospect, it was such an incredible coincidence that this masterpiece by Wong Kar Wai was all about a pair of queer men from Hong Kong, completely stranded in Buenos Aires, bickering and fighting over the smallest things.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness that only exists when you are with someone you cannot leave. What makes Happy Together so precise, so haunting, is its attention to texture. Christopher Doyle’s cinematography is like bruised fruit — vivid and collapsing at the same time. Neon greens, saturated blues, the flicker of streetlamps on taxi windows. Even in its ugliness, the film is impossibly beautiful. What does it mean to try to love someone who is always slipping away? What does it mean to document this attempt, not with language, but with light, colour, time?