Wong Kar-wai’s Argentine Affair: Happy Together as a Translingual and Multimodal Adaptation

Abstract In 2021, a 4K-restored rendition of Wong Kar-wai’s iconic film Happy Together (1997) returned to theatres across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Argentina, marking the film’s enduring transnational appeal two decades after its Cannes premiere. This article investigates the film’s intricate cultural ties to Argentina. I argue that Happy Together not only enhances the cultural connections between Hong Kong and Argentina but also showcases Wong’s translingual and multimodal approaches to film adaptation. ‘Translingual’ refers to the film’s literary source: I demonstrate how Wong skilfully wove elements from Manuel Puig's 1973 novel The Buenos Aires Affair into his film through a threefold Spanish-English-Chinese process of rewriting. Subsequently, I contend that various cultural facets of Argentina—the literature of Puig, the soundscape of Piazzolla’s tango, and the landscapes of the Iguazú Falls and Tierra del Fuego—contributed significantly to the Hong Kong auteur’s multimodal adaptation. In short, this article proposes a dialogic perspective on Hong Kong cinema by considering Argentina as a reflective mirror brimming with aesthetic and geopolitical implications. Through the lens of Happy Together, this study moves beyond Western-centric reception paradigms by spotlighting the cultural and socio-political affinities between Latin America and Asia, thus bringing to the forefront the often-overlooked transpacific connections within the Global South.