I didn't think so the first time I saw HAPPY TOGETHER, but I really think this film is a masterpiece. Technically it's amazing - the hand-held camera-work is incredible, and the mindbending shifts from saturated colors to monochrome (which I first felt was a stylish stunt) really underscores the loneliness and alienation of the characters brilliantly - the overall effect by the films' end is devastating.

HAPPY TOGETHER was apparently also - at least partially - inspired by the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig, author of 'Kiss Of The Spider Woman' among many other novels, and Puig's fiction tackles similar issues in a similarly fractured style (filled with footnotes, digressions and sudden shifts in perspective), all to incredibly powerful emotional effect.

If HAPPY TOGETHER is something of an homage to Puig, it's a great one. On it's own it's also a devastating portrait of a disintegrating relationship.

Happy Together is a throbbing, raw, and profoundly nostalgic lament from two displaced traveling Chinamen yearning for emotional soundness, for their homeland, and for each other. Wong doesn't front us any of the flickering that can still be struck between lovers who fight all the time. There is no deep poetic interpretation of the story itself, but by leaving so much unsaid, writer-director Wong Kar-Wai doesn't make the misstep of suffocating his characters' relationship with trite soap dialogue. That is not to say, however, that the film even remotely knows the meaning of the phrase "less is more."

You don't watch this film as much as seize on to it. Letting it yank you every which way is a raucous yet intriguing excursion, with fertile visual stylizations that trail you long after seeing the film, all with the impact to communicate directly with the heart. The visuals make the film come alive, and make material the displacement, and thus the unhinging, that the main characters feel from their surroundings and each other. Rather than using dialogue, this highly stylized romance chiefly imparts its themes and moods through its images, and Wong fashions an interior audiovisual composition about the mood swings of a love affair. Wong's use of images for purely emotional photogenic value, feverish camera movements, jukebox soundtrack and his improvisation and experimentation with the actors have an effect reminiscent of Scorsese's Mean Streets. In Wong's emotional roller coaster of a film, the characters seem to have a formidable intuitive certainty that their relationship is star- crossed sooner or later, but they follow passionate impulses regardless, giving the film a dreamy texture that it can't shake as its lovers turn-step to and fro during their free-form Argentine spree.

Wong gradually layers the relationship, just like it would happen in real life, and the doubts and obscurities are constant. He extracts powerful performances from his lead actors. While Leslie Cheung gracefully fluctuates his moments between yearning, resentment, and anger, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is the calm eye of the storm.

Leung acts from the inside. We intuit his feelings through his natural physical subtleties, chiefly through the sensitive eyes. Even purely physical scenes, like the fights he has with Leslie Cheung's character, don't happen suddenly. Leung winds up for these moments instinctively and then defensively underplays them. And when the tears come, they pour without affectation, making me wonder from what part of Leung's soul he quietly unearths these moments from as Wong rolls the camera.

Two Chinese lovers drift around Buenos Aires, attempting to come to grips with a relationship that is clearly on the skids in this interesting and frustrating film 'Cheun gwong tsa sit' (Happy Together) by the very talented Kar Wai Wong. On vacation from Hong Kong, Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung ) and Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) are presented in an obviously unhappy state, but we are not privy to the cause of their unhappiness. Yes, there is infidelity, there are outside attractions, and all of the 'things' that could create this state, but we are left to look at this sad young couple as a metaphor for the struggles in emotions and loves that so often surface in a dying relationship, not only in the gay relationship we are seeing but in straight relationships as well. The universals hold true.

Kar Wai Wong loves the non-linear approach to story telling and in this early film the method of his direction feels a bit too disjointed, too uninvolved in the character development. Not that the actors do not render fine performances: both Leung and Cheung give brave portrayals of lost souls and we cannot help but care for both of them. And the remainder of the cast is on target (Chen Chang and Gregory Dayton).

What holds the little hints of greatness that were to come (this film dates back to 1997) is suggested in the lighting and camera work, both of which provide as major a role in the film as the actors and chaotic storyline. The unity of mood and story is solidly at one in this little film, showing us just how creative the writer director was to become.