Days Of Being Wild

In 1960 Hong Kong, self-absorbed and emotionally aloof Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) seduces reserved Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), then drifts away when she begins to get serious. He takes up with Leung Fung-ying (Carina Lau), a brash and boisterous dancer. But Su isn't over the relationship, and hangs around his building to pine, meeting kindly beat cop Tide (Andy Lau), who suggests she call him whenever she wants to talk. She doesn't; he winds up becoming a sailor and leaving Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, Yuddy's aunt (Rebecca Pan), who raised him and fosters a complicated love-hate relationship with him, plans to move to the US with a boyfriend, and finally tells Yuddy what he's wanted to know for years--who and where his mother is. He immediately abandons his girlfriend to seek his mother in the Philippines, while his best friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung) tries to take his place with the spurned Leung Fung-ying, failing miserably.

Yuddy's mother refuses even to see him. After collapsing in the street drunk, he is helped back to his hotel by a passing sailor--Tide. That night the two men forge a tenuous friendship; the next day, Tide accompanies Yuddy, not realizing he's going to rob a local for a passport. A fight breaks out and the two wind up fleeing by train, on which Yuddy is shot by an unknown assailant and slowly dies.

The film ends with scenes of Leung Fung-ying arriving in the Philippines to search in vain for Yuddy, and the phone ringing unanswered in the booth where Tide used to wait patiently for Su to call; then it fades to a new character entirely, another young, good-looking man (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) grooming himself before a mirror just like Yuddy used to do. It's clearly a statement of circularity--one person dies, another takes his place--but it's more than that. The film was planned as the first part of a diptych, its companion piece to follow the Leung character. Weeks of film were shot, but despite the critical acclaim heaped upon DAYS OF BEING WILD (Hong Kong Film Awards for best picture, director, cinematography, art direction, and best actor Leslie Cheung), it was a commercial failure and the second part was cancelled--which, in its own way, is perfectly appropriate. The film--and indeed Wong's oeuvre--is about missed connections and false starts, incompleteness, absence and loss. People intersect randomly, struggle to connect, and fail. Everything is unrequited. The main characters continually cross paths in different interpersonal relationships, and are inevitably left frustrated, bitter, and alone.

Wong, as ever, is preoccupied with time, with how a single quiet moment shared by two people has everlasting repercussions both for them and for those around them. Memory, he suggests, inevitably refracts meaning, as he focuses on reflection, both figurative and literal, with mirrors featuring prominently and much wistful self-analysis related in voice-over from the various characters. Shot in sync sound (an anomaly in Hong Kong at the time) in muted, watery tones of blue and green, it is at once a dreamy vision of thing vaguely recalled and a finely detailed and realistic observation of human behavior. The weather is practically a character, ranging from the torrential downpours of Hong Kong's rainy season to an oppressive summer heat that's distinctly palpable despite being casually taken for granted by the characters; never is it even mentioned.

Wong Kar-wai's first film as director, AS TEARS GO BY (1988), had been intended as part of a conceptual trilogy that similarly never saw completion, and starred actors Maggie Cheung, Jackie Cheung, and Andy Lau. When all three signed for Wong's next film, along with several other popular stars, producer Alan Tang greenlighted DAYS OF BEING WILD without seeing a script. Inspired by Manuel Puig and the fragmented storytelling of much Latin American literature (he would later consummate his love affair with Latin America by filming HAPPY TOGETHER in Buenos Aires), Wong based the script in part on people he remembered from his youth. His family had moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai when he was five. His father, an ex-sailor, rented rooms in their Tsimshatsui apartment to a handsome young man with countless girlfriends, and to a quieter, more thoughtful man who inspired Tide. Looking to capture the rootless and restless mood of the times, Wong forced his cast to do their scenes repeatedly--another oddity in speed-obsessed HK, where actors commonly work on several films at once--until they seemed genuinely weary and resigned, as a result wresting terrific performances all around, filled with telling nuances and gestures.

This was the first time Wong worked with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, replacing Andrew Lau (director of photography on AS TEARS GO BY) part way into filming, and forging a partnership that has resulted in some of the most visually stunning and emotionally probing films of the 1990s. Doyle had previously shot a number of well-regarded films in Taiwan and Hong Kong, including MY HEART IS THAT ETERNAL ROSE (1988) for Patrick Tam, Wong's acknowledged mentor and "supervising editor" of DAYS OF BEING WILD. Doyle has spoken of the camera and actors as dance partners, and with this film made enemies of certain cast members with requests for repeated takes, but delivered a marvelously composed film full of stunning yet restrained imagery. Leung threatens to leave, testing Yuddy, then recognizes his ambivalence and tries to make it sound like she's playing a game. It s not only a terrific piece of acting, but a bravura example of probing camerawork delivered without cuts, following her as she paces around the bed like a trapped animal. There's a stunningly executed but curiously obtrusive tracking shot late in the film that hurries down a street, up a staircase, and across a large reception area before finally settling on Yuddy killing time with Tide; moments later the scene explodes in violence. The slow, beautiful shot of jungle fauna that appears without context under the credits reappears later as the Filipino landscape racing past the train carrying mortally injured Yuddy.

The library music is a seemingly incongruous collection of Latin rumbas and cha-chas from the 1940s and 1950s, but it works superbly, adding a touch of escapist exoticism. When producer Alan Tang declined to back Wong's next film, he found willing supporters and began to run creatively rampant, reinterpreting some of the concepts from the abandoned "Days of Being Wild II" into the epic ASHES OF TIME (1994), with much of this cast returning, including Leslie Cheung as the ambiguous and remote central character. (Violence, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment