Returns Policy
If you are unhappy with your purchase, you can return it to us within 14 days. More details
Film Description
Families are often the absent backdrop for the neuroses of Wong Kar-Wai's characters. Here, in 1960s Hong Kong (in retrospect, the film is a prequel to 'In the Mood for Love'), a James Deanish sleepabout sublimates his Freudian hang-ups into his sexual meanderings. His existential drift is teased out as spatial and temporal dislocation; Wong's direction swoons with his uncertainty.
In Wong Kar-wai's 1991 film Days of Being Wild, Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), a charming drifter captures the attention of store attendant Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) by asking... more >
In Wong Kar-wai's 1991 film Days of Being Wild, Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), a charming drifter captures the attention of store attendant Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) by asking her to look at his watch. When she sees that it says one minute before 3:00PM on April 16, 1960, he tells her that she will never forget the moment and will dream about him that night. The next time they meet, the moment becomes two, then one hour, then weeks and months but Yuddy is like the mythical bird with no legs that just flies and flies and never lands. Days of Being Wild unfolds like a dream with color filters, unusual shadows, and the sights and sounds of Hong Kong's rainy nights and sweltering summers. Based on the director's memories from his childhood and admiration for the style of Argentinean novelist Manuel Puig (Heartbreak Tango), the film is a series of episodes involving six people who touch each other's lives.
Supported by outstanding performances by Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and Jacky Cheung as Yuddy's only friend Zeb, it is a tone poem about longing and one's search for identity. Yuddy does not know where he came from or where he is going. He treats women with little respect, discarding them when they no longer serve his purpose. Like many of us, he pines for the things that might have been, the word that was never said, and the love that remains elusive. An artistic triumph, Days of Being Wild is a moody, atmospheric film that, with its background of 1950's rumbas and cha-cha's, forecasts the director's later In the Mood For Love. As a beautifully realized example of alienated people desperately seeking their place in the world, however, it stands securely on its own.
