Most cinephiles remember the first time they saw a film by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. For me it was Ah Fei Jing Juen (English title: Days of Being Wild, 1990), which I rented on VHS from Blast-Off Video in Atlanta, Georgia. The owner, Sam Patton, encouraged me to watch it and it was a revelation, not like his usual recommendations which were more likely to be softcore exploitation films like Doris Wishman’s Deadly Weapons (1974) starring Chesty Morgan and her 73 inch bust or a bizarre obscurity like The Manipulator aka B.J. Lang Presents (1971) with Mickey Rooney at his most demented. What I saw was nothing like what I had seen coming out of the Hong Kong film industry at that time – mostly martial arts action films and kinetic crime thrillers such as John Woo’s The Killer (1989). No, Days of Being Wild is a lush, sensual cinematic poem, a visually innovative tale of unrequited longing, one-sided relationships and melancholy reflections on life as it was in Hong Kong in 1960, the year the movie takes place.
It was the second feature film for Wong Kar Wai – his directorial debut was the stylish gangster melodrama As Tears Go By (1988) – but it was a complete departure from the crime genre, although it did include some gangland violence in one of the film’s many subplots. The first half of Days of Being Wild establishes the main players in a multi-layered character study starting with Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), a handsome, self-centered Lothario, who flirts with Su (Maggie Cheung), a snack shop worker. Over a matter of days, he breaks down her resistance and eventually they become lovers with her moving into his apartment. It doesn’t last long due to his perpetual unfaithfulness and Yuddy soon takes up with Lulu (Carina Lau), a volatile nightclub dancer.
Yuddy’s life begins to unravel when he learns that Rebecca (Rebecca Pan) is not his real mother and that she was paid to raise him by his real parents who live in the Philippines. He begins to question his whole life and it makes him increasingly non-committal to the two women, Su and Lulu, who have fallen in love with him and continue to pursue him. Su’s solution to her heartbreak is to wander the streets at night where she finds a sympathetic confidant in Tide (Andy Lau), the neighborhood cop.
A major change occurs when Yuddy departs for the Philippines to track down his real mother and leaves his apartment to his friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung). Lulu winds up becoming Zeb’s new girlfriend and Tide, who has developed a hopeless infatuation with Su, leaves his job as a cop and joins the navy. Tide is soon stationed in the Philippines and, by a strange coincidence, rescues a very drunk Yuddy from a garbage dump (the latter had been nursing his sorrow after his mother refused to see him).
The rest of Days of Being Wild follows the downward trajectory of Yuddy’s life while cutting back and forth between the lives of those who knew and loved him in Hong Kong. What is fascinating about the movie is how the first half operates like a fever dream brimming with romance, passion, desperation and smoldering resentments. Then it transitions into a noir-like melodrama with a tragic twist before ending on a note of dreamy ambiguity (a debonair, well-dressed man, played by Tony Leung, primps before a mirror in preparation for an evening of gambling).
The fact that the tonal shifts are rarely jarring and flow together so well is part of the movie’s seamless free flow structure. But what really captivated me was Wong Kar-Wai’s use of sensual Latin American dance music, especially songs by Xavier Cugat, his time-tripping editing rhythms and the intimate, hand-held cinematography of Christopher Doyle, working for the first time with the director. Doyle goes for unconventional angles, overhead shots, extreme close-ups and an unusual color palette. There is also a spectacular tracking shot which starts in the street, enters the dark hallway of a building turning corners until it comes to a stairway, climbs to the top and comes to rest on Yuddy and his friend Tide in a restaurant dining room awaiting a meeting with an underworld figure.
Indeed, Days of Being Wild is a movie full of indelible moments – Yuddy violently attacking a suitor of his stepmother with a hammer or dancing to a samba in his underwear; Su and Tide walking down a rain slick street illuminated by water puddles reflecting the nighttime glow of blue-green neon lights; Lulu and Yuddy’s playful but rough foreplay games; Tide pulling out his gun and murdering several thugs in a restaurant; Su arriving in the Philippines to look for Yuddy while Tide tries to contact her back home in Hong Kong via the phone booth where they first met. Missed connections, fate and coincidence combine to make life more complicated and melancholy for the protagonists in this rich, atmospheric stew.
Of course, the magic elixir is the casting. Some of the most attractive and charismatic young actors in Hong Kong cinema fill the key roles and all of them would go on to greater fame and glory in the following years. Maggie Cheung, who had already established herself as an action-comedy star in Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985) and Police Story 2 (1988), would go on to star in box office hits like The Heroic Trio (1993) while winning critical acclaim for her performances in Irma Vep (1996), Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), and Clean (2004), which won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Andy Lau, who is also a successful singer-songwriter and film producer, would go on to become a Hong Kong superstar for his work in films like Infernal Affairs (2002), Infernal Affairs III (2003), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Shock Wave (2017). In the sultry role of Lulu, Carina Lau is just as famous and popular in her own country as Maggie Cheung and has demonstrated her versatility as an actress in the cross-dressing comedy He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (1994), the period epic Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and the blockbuster detective thriller Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010). In real life, Lau is married to her Days of Being Wild co-star Tony Leung (even though they don’t have any scenes together.)
Last but not least, the true star of the film, Leslie Cheung, was one of the most popular actors in Chinese cinema at the time, having appeared in such Hong Kong landmarks as John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), the action fantasy A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), Stanley Kwan’s period romance Rouge (1987) and Kaige Chen’s Farewell My Concubine (1992). It was a blow and a shock to the international film community when Cheung committed suicide in April 2003 at age 46 (he had been suffering from severe depression). He leaves behind an impressiive filmography of over 55 movies during a busy 26-year career.
Days of Being Wild was not a success in China when it was released. In fact, it was a commercial failure and moviegoers walked out or rebelled at preview screenings because they expected a typical crime genre film like Wong Kar-Wai’s previous As Tears Go By. Today the film is considered an early masterpiece from the director, who would become an international celebrity four year later with his critically acclaimed breakthrough film, Chungking Express (1994). Among the recent reassessments of this earlier effort is Andrew Chan of Slate magazine, who wrote “1990’s Days of Being Wild, the sophomore effort that established wandering souls and romantic misconnection as Wong’s enduring fetish subjects, still reverberates with some of the most haunting passages in any Hong Kong movie—and of course it is this colonial city, as much as the ache of love itself, that provides the cause for swooning.” Desson Thomson of The Washington Post stated, “It may have been released in the olden days of 1991, but Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild remains pulsatingly contemporary,” and Ty Burr of The Boston Globe said, “There are images in Days that can make your heart stop for no other reason than that they’re perfect.”
Wong Kar-Wai has admitted in interviews that the making of Days of Being Wild was fraught with production problems. At one point, actress Carina Lau was kidnapped by a Triad for refusing a role in a Chinese mafia produced film (topless photos were later distributed to the press as additional punishment after she was released). This held up the film shoot temporarily and there were more telling continuity issues such as that mysterious final scene of Tony Leung getting dressed to the sounds of “Jungle Drums” by Xavier Cugat. Originally, this segment was meant to be the opening scene of the sequel, Days of Being Wild 2 but the producers decided to abandon it. In an interview with Tony Rayns for Sight and Sound, the director said, “Days of Being Wild was for me a very personal reinvention of the 60s. Here, though, we consciously tried to recreate the actuality. I wanted to say something about daily life then, about domestic conditions, neighbours, everything. I even worked out a menu for the period of the shoot, with distinctive dishes for different seasons, and found a Shanghainese lady to cook them so that the cast would be eating them as we shot. I wanted the film to contain all those flavours that are so familiar to me. The audience probably won’t notice a thing, but it meant a lot to me emotionally. When we started filming the 1962 scenes, William Chang asked me if we were finally making Days of Being Wild, Part II. I’ll never make Part II as originally envisaged, because that story doesn’t mean the same to me anymore. But this is in some sense Part II as I might conceive it now.”
Another interesting observation is that Tony Leung plays a character named Chow Mo-wan in Days of Being Wild (according to the credits). He would play this same character in two more Wong Kar-Wai films – In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) – although the connection between them is never made obvious by the director. Astute film lovers will also notice that Xavier Cugat’s rendition of “Perfidia” is a favorite of Wong Kar-Wai and is featured in all three of the above films providing a thematic link between them.
So what is my favorite film by Wong Kar-Wai? I think In the Mood for Love is his masterpiece but after watching 2046 again recently I firmly believe that one is equal to if not superior to In the Mood for Love. Then again, sometimes I cite Chungking Express as my favorite. In the end, however, Days of Being Wild is my gateway film to the director’s work and I never get tired of re-watching it. The one thing that always surprises me is that not one Wong Kar-Wai film has ever been Oscar nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film award…or any award.
Days of Being Wild has been available on various formats over the years but the best option for fans of the film is the 7-disc Blu-ray collection World of Wong Kar Wai from The Criterion Collection, which was released in March 2021 and is already out of print (you can still purchase copies from online sellers). It includes seven of the director’s best known films plus an alternate version of Days of Being Wild and a host of extra features.
Other links of interest:
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7330-world-of-wong-kar-wai-like-the-most-beautiful-times
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/wong-kar-wai-days-of-being-wild/
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/christopher-doyle-and-wong-kar-wai
https://tonyleung.info/tony/?p=1163
Cinema Sojourns 