Queer Cinema World Tour is our regular feature taking you to destinations behind your favourite LGBTQ2S+ film moments. This week we visit Iguazú Falls, the setting for 1997’s Happy Together.
The quarrelsome gay couple in Wong Kar-wai’s stellar contribution to New Queer Cinema never make it as a duo to their dream destination, despite coming all the way from Hong Kong to Argentina.
Though Wong had built a reputation as a visionary director through the 1990s, this tormented love story/failed quest was his unlikely international breakthrough. The director followed it up with 2000’s In the Mood for Love, a much straighter romance (though no less poetic), that is perhaps his best known film.
The spring 1997 release date for Happy Together was no coincidence; on June 30 of that year, the British handed Hong Kong back to China after 100 years of colonial rule. Although only the last few moments of the film takes place in Hong Kong, it can be viewed, in part, as commentary on the uncertainty Hongkongers were facing at the time—one of the opening shots is of a British National (Overseas) Passport, which was a symbol of independence for Hongkongers, since it allowed them more freedom than a Chinese passport.
The film’s politics, sexual and otherwise, are subtle. Wong has said he doesn’t like it when people categorize Happy Together as “a gay film” because he hates movies “with labels like ‘gay film,’ ‘art film’ or ‘commercial film.’” But the straight director does not shy away from non-judgmentally depicting same-sex horniness and gay promiscuity.
We first meet Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) having sex in a bare-bones hotel room somewhere in Argentina. They have journeyed to the other side of the world after admiring a depiction of the natural wonder that is Iguazú Falls on a lamp they bought back in Hong Kong. But they get lost on the way to the falls and give up trying to find it together.
If you have a better sense of direction—or perhaps book a tour, which makes it much easier—you’ll be blown away by the drama of the waterfalls on the borders of Argentina and Brazil; they make Niagara Falls go looking for some Viagra.
What’s queer life like in this far-flung region of South America, which is also close to Paraguay? The base towns for a visit, Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) and Foz do Iguaçu (Brazil), are too small to have much of a gay nightlife, though many of the hotels are LGBTQ+ friendly. Most of the visitors here are just in for a day or two, to experience the mammoth attraction, so if you’re going to have any meetups, it’ll probably happen through apps at night. Of course, you could bring your own gays with you, by travelling with a tour provided by an operator like Canada-based Out Adventures.
Unable to find the falls, and with no money to return to Hong Kong, the couple end up in Buenos Aires. Finally, a place with an impressive gay nightlife!
But their life there is anything but gay. Fai gets a job managing Chinese holiday makers when their tour bus takes them to a tango bar. The location is, in fact, a real-life tango speakeasy, BAR SUR Tango Danza Show (Estados Unidos 299, San Telmo, Buenos Aires). It’s still there and has been a tourist attraction since 1967—Liza Minnelli, Antonio Banderas and Hugh Laurie have all visited. The San Telmo neighbourhood has a cool, 1920s stuck-in-time vibe that makes it particularly photogenic. About a five-minute walk from the bar is Lugar Gay (Defensa 1120, San Telmo, Buenos Aires), a long-standing bed and breakfast, with private and dorm rooms for gay and bi men.
Po-Wing, meanwhile, enters a downward spiral. When he’s in bed and needs care, Fai says they are at their happiest—though both of them seem glum and tormented.
If Fai were single, carefree and in Buenos Aires today, there would be countless options for him to explore. There’s Fiesta Plop on Fridays and Fiesta Puerco on Saturdays at Teatro Vorterix (Av. Federico Lacroze 3455, Colegiales, Buenos Aires), the legendary electronic music-fuelled Glam Disco (José A. Cabrera 3046, Recoleta, Buenos Aires) and the ginormous straight-friendly Amerika (Gascón 1040, Almagro, Buenos Aires). Instead, when Fai and Po-Wing leave the apartment, they drink litre-sized beers out at the trashy Cantina 3 Amigos, which, as far as we can tell, is now a nautical-themed restaurant, Il Piccolo Vapore (Suárez 300, La Boca, Buenos Aires), in the working-class-but-touristy neighbourhood of La Boca.
Wanting to put some distance between them, Fai tells Po-Wing that he’s going to see a lighthouse in Ushuaia, a resort town in the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, in the far south of the country. There are no gay bars there that we could find, but there is a fun-looking Irish pub called Dublin (9 de Julio 168, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego). The town is actually part of queer history. In 2009, a dozen years after the fictional events of Happy Together, Latin America’s first legal same-gender marriage took place in Ushuaia; the two grooms went there after unsuccessfully trying to get married in Buenos Aires because the Tierra del Fuego governor was sympathetic to the cause.
For a while, Fai doesn’t leave Buenos Aires. He spends his time cruising public washrooms and porn theatres while avoiding Po-Wing as much as he can, though they often find themselves in the same sleazy spots. Fai eventually goes by himself to Iguazú Falls, then, at the very end of the film, back to Asia—first to Taipei, which still held (and holds) its independence, then finally home again to Hong Kong.
Po-Wing goes by himself to the Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse (Canal Beagle, Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego) off the coast of Ushuaia—perhaps following Fai, perhaps charting his own course.
Known as the lighthouse at the end of the world because of a Jules Verne novel (the lighthouse that’s actually the last stop before Antarctica is on Isla de los Estados, which is farther east), this is the last time viewers see Po-Wing. His future, like Hong Kong’s in 1997, remains a mystery.