Glücklich vereint (1997)

Glücklich vereint: Directed by Kar-Wai Wong. With Leslie Cheung, Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Chen Chang, Gregory Dayton. A couple take a trip to Argentina but both men find their lives drifting apart in opposite directions.

“Aw-kommonu0026#39;s notes on u0026quot;Happy Togetheru0026quot; are typical of those who cannot approach a film without aligning it with definite paradigms and secure standards. In this case, the paradigm is u0026quot;Midnight Cowboyu0026quot; — a film that belongs to a totally different genre, was written and shot according to u0026quot;naturalisticu0026quot; procedures of Hollywood commercial cinema and, most of all, deals with romance from a quite different perspective. In u0026quot;Midnight Cowboyu0026quot; redemption of homoeroticism comes through death, a strategy that was quite revealing of the morals that prevailed at the time the movie was produced. u0026quot;Happy Togetheru0026quot;, on the other hand, deals with romance as if it could have been homo-, hetero- or whatever, and even though homoeroticism is such an essential element to the narrative, the protagonistsu0026#39;love affair is a pretext for the emergence of their decentered identities, their search for love and friendship and, most important, it ends on a note of hope of future encounters. All that in a poetic tone, one that demands a continuous esthetic reconstruction, hardly understood (or accepted) by those who are encapsulated in a world of conventional filmmaking.”