Days of Being Wild (1990)
Director: Wong Kar-wai Run Time: 94 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1990
Starring: Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Rebecca Pan
Country: Hong Kong
Language: Cantonese, Shanghainese, Tagalog, English, Mandarin
Screening as part of The World of Wong Kar Wai
About the film:
Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough sophomore feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style.
The first film in a loosely connected, ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046, this ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twenty-somethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a cycle of frustrated desire.
The director’s inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the film its gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a never-realized sequel, Days of Being Wild is an exhilarating first expression of Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing, dislocation, and the restless search for human connection.
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