Early on Days of Being Wild, Leslie Cheung seduces Maggie Cheung after convincing her that they would always remember the one minute they spend together. It’s the film’s key passage (IF noto f Wong Kar-wai’s whole career),the one that haunts the remaining action. Some of Days of Being Wild’s pleasure comes from seen Wong’s ability to perfect capture a moment’s texture finds its first complete expression. It is his second feature, but a big step up from his debut As Tears Go By, with Wong’s finally finding his very unusual work’s method and (with Patrick Tam’s help) finding how to shape material to his own personal needs. It also remains in a certain way his Best and most direct film. A piece of time sustained; every sequence suggesting a captured moment, observed and imagined till smallest of details. Just think of Maggie Cheung scenes working at the stadium’s bar, or any given moment starring Jacky Cheung, who in few minutes of screen time suggests as much as the leads.
Days of Being Wild is a cruel film. Its dramatic logic is that of the aborted desire in the form of circle of rejections. Pretty much seconds after Leslie and Maggie get their minute, they are already fighting months later –their romance lost in an ellipsis. Days of Being Wild hás some time for seduction, and none for romance. Despite his reputation as serial womanizer, Wong Kar Wai’s always shoots Leslie Cheung post-coitus, exhausted, his mind far away from whoever is the woman next to him. The only one that truly holds his attention been the mother whose identity He don’t know, and who when he finally manage to find refuses to seen him, just another rejection among many.
With the possible exception of Chungking Express, a certain atmosphere of desperation hás always been a key aspect of Wong Kar-wai’s cinema, but only here and in 2046 (the Wong’s film that Days of Being Wild is most similar to) that it encounters full expression. Even the film’s structure makes this impression even stronger, suggesting that every one of those isolate moments ,as lively as they might be,add very little into each other. Days of Being Wild’s Hong Kong is a phantom metropolis. As expensive as the film might have been, it doesn’t look like a cent was expend in extras; Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau can walk with no direction through Hong Kong’s night certain that they won’t meet a single soul.
Days of Being Wild is an incomplete film. Of the filmmakers many attempts to find a film analogue to his beloved argentine literature (Patrick Tam has pointed the film was moldered on Manuel Puig’s excellent Heartbreak Tango),Days of Being Wild is the most successful with its action taking place in a series of fragments throughout a little more than two years, without one’s never being sure when the next shot will take place in. Far beyond its multiple ellipses Days of Being Wild is literally an incomplete film, being originally planned as par tone of a diptych, a project never allowed to finish thanks to this film commercial flop. What remains of Days of Being Wild part two is its astonishing final sequence with a young Tony Leung Chi Wai preparing to go out at night. It is one of Wong Kar-wai’s cinema greatest moments, a silent sequence of around three minutes which draws us in this nameless character while he does his nails, dresses a coat, gets his money and game cards and finishes his hair. This is one of Leung’s greatest works despite He having no dialogue, everything we learn about his chracters caming though some very mundane actions; but that is exavtly the scene’s very concrete appeal, that onl.y give us what is visible to our gaze.
Despite that, Days of Being Wild ended up being “followed” by In The Mood for Love and 2046, and it is very interesting to see how 60’s Hong Kong vary and develops film by film: from a period that exist before anything else as an idea in Days of Being Wild, till a total immersion in history in 2046. Seen together, they do make for a vast and beautiful historical epic about Hong Kong’s sense of loss.
A Chinese Feast 