Days of Being Wild

Kar Wai Wong’s 1991 Days of Being Wild is quickly recognizable as a forerunner of such later films as In the Mood for Love and 2046. The cinematography is arresting and highly effective. Much of the film takes place in the apartment of the main character, Yuddy (Leslie Cheug). The film is structured around interwoven relationships of three men and three women. One of the women is the adoptive mother of one of the men, Yuddy, who searches for and finds but does not ever actually see his real mother in the latter portion of the film. Clocks and time, a legless bird that never lands, and travel are motifs. The film takes place over a year’s time, in 1960, and the last scene returns in a cryptic, tantalizing way to the earliest scenes in the film. Parts of the film are difficult to follow, but as with other Kar Wai Wong films the parts that make sense and the parts that don't are still fascinating.

As in the two most recent films, love lost is a major theme. The film makes effective use of music. There is a certain incoherence in the film that also looks forward to in the Mood for Love and 2046, but those later films constructed a compelling rhythm and narrative logic that this film strains towards but never quite achieves.

This is the sort of film that would bear rewatching. I dozed through brief moments of it and lost track of the narrative. I should watch it again. Does everything that this film portrays really happen? I don’t think so. Does the main character ever realize who the woman he really loves is? Does he ever find her, or she him? Kar Wai Wong doesn’t offer answers, and they don’t really matter.