Days of Being Wild

Rating PG Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Jacky Cheung, Alex Man, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung Directed by Kar-Wai Wong, Wong Kar-Wei Publisher Kino Video External Links Kino Video

For the past fifteen years or so, Honk Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai has been building a reputation as one of the most unique poets of the world cinema. Like most poets, he has used the breadth of his work to explore one theme. He has picked it apart, rebuilt it, then deconstructed it again. What has been so fascinating to watch is the way that he can keep looking at the same idea but always make it appear fresh and, better yet, surprising.

Wong is the poet of longing. In a typical Wong film, his characters will want something with all their heart but none will ever be able to admit to it. In Chungking Express (1994) a lonely waitress contents herself daily by breaking into and cleaning the apartment of the cop she loves from afar. And his longing for another is such that he never notices his apartment becoming steadily cleaner and more organized. In Wong's masterpiece, In the Mood for Love (2000), a man and a woman discover that their respective spouses are having an affair. To cope with the pain, they meet nightly to "reenact” how they believe the affair must have begun. Soon, each realizes they love the other but neither has the courage to confront this truth.

For Wong, the fact of longing isn't nearly so interesting as the behavior its pain enforces on the characters. Although only his second film, 1991's Days of Being Wild makes this theme clear and, more important, sets the tone for the way that Wong will approach it in his future films.

Days of Being Wild is a roundelay, a kind of narrative relay race in which one member of a couple meets someone then hands off the narrative to that person. This new character will then be the beginning point of a new couple with their lover eventually handing off the narrative to yet another new partner. Max Ophuls flirted brilliantly with this type of structure in La Ronde (1950) then passed it off to Jean Luc Godard who passed it to Robert Altman who passed it to Paul Thomas Anderson and so on.

Set in the the early sixties in Hong Kong, Days of Being Wild begins with Luddy (Leslie Cheung), a physically passionate but emotionally distant young man who has no interest in the women he seduces beyond whatever physical pleasures they might yield. His seduction of shop girl Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung in a precursor of the character she would play in In the Mood for Love) leads to a boredom that he can only cure by sleeping with a showgirl (Carina Lau). Shaken, Su Li-zhen leaves his place and stumbles into a conversation with a beat cop (Andy Lau) while the showgirl finds that she has a shadow in Luddy's heartsick best friend. Each of these disparate elements will conclude, reopen, then conclude again in a finale that is both inevitable and completely unsuspected.

The narrative device may not be new but Wong's handling gives it a freshness that somehow manages to make the repressed emotions feel explosive even when they remain resolutely beneath the surface. Working for the first time with the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Wong views the time and place without nostalgia. This Hong Kong is not bathed in the glow of the past nor, though, is it particularly realistic. This is an interior world, one where lighting and sets respect the logic of the characters and their feelings. Here, as in all of his later work, the weather seems to act at the behest of his characters. When the confused Su Li-zhen stumbles into conversation with the rapidly lovestruck cop, their confusion is mirrored in the evening rain that seems to come from nowhere and settle on both like a shroud.

The romantic intensity that suffuses Days of Being Wild is also quite unique to the work of Wong Kar-wai. For all of the fatalism that seems to drive the characters, none ever quite loses sight of the feelings that got them into trouble in the first place. Maggie Cheung is especially adept at playing this subtext. Her seemingly subservient surface hides not only the passion of love, but also the anger that can trump it once she is forced to admit that the man she loves was never really worth it. At the same time, she makes it clear that even this deep a loss is only a temporary setback, one of the little eddies we all hit in the stream of our own feelings. And Wong beautifully punctuates this same belief with a surprising final three minutes. Once he has rounded out his story, he suddenly brings in a dapper new character (Tony Leung) to hint that the roundelay will go on.

Kino Video has released Days of Being Wild both separately and as part of a box set of previously released Wong Kar-wai titles (the earlier As Tears Go By and the later Chungking Express, Happy Together and Fallen Angels). Like the others, Days of Being Wild has a solid if not particularly outstanding transfer and a minimum of extras (just some trailers, a few stills and a filmography). If you don't have any Wong Kar-wai in your collection then the box set offers a perfect chance to rectify the situation. Even as a stand alone title, though, Days of Being Wild is a treasure, a work of emotional force - of pure cinema - that deserves a place on any DVD shelf.