Happy Together.

If Vito Russo were around to update his landmark study The Celluloid Closet, he might note with a sigh of satisfaction that queer cinema came of age in the 1990s -- and emerged tough as nails.

The maverick filmmakers of today's gay-indie scene are, by and large, out, comfortable in their skin, and indifferent to any PC imperatives. Films such as Todd Haynes's Poison, Gregg Araki's The Living End, and Ira Sachs's The Delta bask in their own insolence, with protagonists who risk being resistible, if not downright repellent, stylistic hocuspocus that holds the viewer at arm's length. They look terrific, but they're not looking to make friends.

Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together is a classic example. It is the story of two lovers m a foreign land who are trying to repair a broken relationship. It is all but bereft of happiness. The quality of togetherness that we observe is enough to make a wounded heart give up on love altogether. The first time I saw it, I couldn't wait for it to end. The second time, I couldn't peel my eyes off it.

The gulf of dysfunction dividing Lai and Ho can be measured from the opening scene, a bout of lovemaking that teeters uncomfortably close to rape. The embattled boyfriends (played with naked ferocity by Hong Kong matinee idol Tony Leung [Leung Chiu-Wai] and Farewell My Concubine's Leslie Cheung [Cheung Kwok-Wing]) have gone to Argentina to start over at Iguazu Falls, a romantic lost horizon that, like their hoped-for reconciliation, will remain forever out of reach.

En route to the falls, they fight and split. With their travel budget shot, Ho makes a killing in Buenos Aires as a hustler while Lai struggles along in a series of occupations that each carry subtle metaphoric resonance for his situation (tango-bar doorman, chef, and meat packer). Ho; goes running back to Lai after being beaten up by a john, and as his wounds mend the pair renew their Strindbergian rites of mental abuse. When Lai confesses in retrospect that this was the happiest time they would spend together, you don't know whether to weep for them or throw your popcorn, cup at the screen.

Superficially, Wong's Happy Together is a horse of a far different and darker color than his Chungking Express, a giddily eccentric (and resolutely heterosexual) romantic caper. What they share on deeper inspection is a remorse for the stubborn elusiveness of love -- gay or straight -- and a sensitivity to the solitude of the exile. Just when the film and its audience are about to implode from Ho and Lai's punishing tango, Wong leavens the drama with a delightful dishwasher from Taipei named Chang (Chang Chen), whom Lai befriends during his kitchen stint. Fresh, adorable, and sexually unformed, Chang impresses upon Lai the possibility of seeing through listening as well as the repleneshing power of camaraderies forged by strangers at sea in a strange land.

Wong (named Best Director at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for this film) achieves an empathy for that alien experience through a rush of abrupt, unfinished scenes that have the jagged fascination of broken mirror pieces. Wong has cool taste in music, and the film's abrasive edges are smoothed over by a haunting score that cannily employs Astor Piazzolla's "Tango Apasionado," two compositions by Frank Zappa, and an aching vocal by South American crooner Caetano Veloso. The film's greatest asset is the dazzling palette of Australian cinematographer Chris Doyle, whose alternation of black and white with blue and orange filters drapes the lovers in a ravishing gauze of melancholy. Doyle's slow-motion and stop-camera effects make the lighting of a boyfriend's cigarette or a farewell handshake between chums more intensely erotic than the brusque act of penetration that sets Happy Together off on its sad, sad course.