'DAYS' AFTER YEARS
Wong Kar-Wai's early feature points the way to his later work
By Andy Klein
Among the international film community, writer-director Wong Kar-Wai - whose 1991 Days of Being Wild is being reissued this week - is probably the most critically lauded Hong Kong director, for reasons both good and bad. On the one hand, surrounded by a relentlessly commercial industry, he has stuck to being artistic. On the other, he has stuck to being "artistic" - embracing nearly opposite values from most of his contemporaries and making the sort of films that HK-loving arthouse patrons were fleeing from during the great Hong Kong invasion of the early '90s. There are times when you say, "Enough already with the Antonioni and Bertolucci! Could we please just have two guys in costumes flying through the air, waving swords at each other?"
Curiously enough, Wong cut his teeth as a screenwriter of crowd-pleasing wacky comedies that are just about as far from his directorial work as can be imagined. The first film he directed, As Tears Go By (1988), a Hongkongified gloss on Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, was relatively conventional; the critical and commercial response enabled Wong to get the budget for Days of Being Wild, which ended up as a critical success - it won five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture - but a commercial flop.
It's easy to see why: In an industry devoted to visceral reactions like laughter, fear, and excitement, this meandering, elliptical film must have seemed alien. In fact, there were other HK directors at the time making similar kinds of films, but not with big budgets and all-star casts.
Leslie Cheung stars as Yuddy (York in the subtitles of some earlier versions), a disaffected, fuck-'em-and-shuck-'em stud in an early-'60s Hong Kong where it's always night and it's almost always raining. He has been spoiled rotten by Rebecca (Rebecca Pan), his doting mother, whose affection occasionally seems other than maternal. His already aimless life has become more complicated ever since Rebecca has informed him that he's adopted; but, to his frustration, she won't reveal his real mother's name.
Yuddy gets involved with So Lai-Chun (Maggie Cheung), who works the box office at a soccer stadium; or, more accurately, she gets involved with him. Her emotions are deep, but his are either shallow or nonexistent. The moment she looks for commitment, he dumps her and takes up with a showgirl named Mimi (Carina Lau), who is Lai-Chun's exact opposite - flashy, not very bright, a bit cheap. Of course, even Mimi has some long-term ambitions, but, every time she brings up commitment and he tells her to get lost, she buckles under and agrees to stay on his terms.
Meanwhile Lai-Chun seeks solace in conversations with a cop (Andy Lau), who quietly falls for her, and Mimi hangs out with Yuddy's old friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung), whose devotion she spurns. This plays out during a stretch of 20 minutes, when Yuddy disappears from the film. (Yuddy is also absent during a two-minute coda right before the closing credits that confuses many audiences: We see Tony Leung Chui-Wai, looking something like Yuddy in the dark, getting all duded up for a night on the town. This was a teaser for the sequel Wong would have made had the film not tanked.)
Twelve years after first seeing Days of Being Wild, I'm finally developing some fondness for it. On its last reissue, I described it as "mannered, artsy, and pretentious ... like Ashes of Time" but without the latter's "dazzling visual style to redeem it." My change of heart may be because I've grown more used to Wong's idiom or because of the retroactive context provided by later masterpieces like Happy Together (1997) and In the Mood for Love (2000).
But it also may be related to Leslie Cheung's suicide a year and a half ago. Yuddy can be off-putting because he's such a world-weary narcissist. The only reason we may care about him is because he's so charismatic and beautiful. That part of the character came from Cheung, who had the power to seduce the audience exactly as Yuddy seduces So-Lai and Mimi. Yuddy seems to put no value on his own life; the prospect of his own death seems to mean nothing to him. In the context of real events, that now seems doubly moving.Published: 01/06/2005
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