In the Mood
Elliptical, sensuous melodrama offers past glimpse of Wong Kar-wai's future greatness
Days of Being Wild
Opening Friday at the Belcourt
It's appropriate that Days of Being Wild, the second movie by Wong Kar-wai, should finally reach us almost 15 years after its release. Not because the movie isn't good: on the contrary, it made me feel like a Ronettes fan who suddenly learned about "Be My Baby." But Wong's movies consist almost entirely of moments out of time. Even the ones that are set in the present—like Chungking Express, his magical 1994 scrambling of the Hong Kong cop-movie genre—concern themselves with expiration dates, deadlines and the other desperate strategies people use to keep time from slipping through their fingers.
Days of Being Wild, an elliptical romantic melodrama made in 1990, is set in a 1960 Hong Kong that might have been imagined by someone in 1955, fueled by the starpower of a different era. In the first shot, the hero, Yuddy, played by Cantonese pop superstar Leslie Cheung, cocks his slim hips up against an ancient Coke machine and strikes his best James Dean. He's coming on to Su Lizhen (the magnificent Maggie Cheung), a skeptical sports-arena cashier who doesn't take the bait. After days of flirting, he woos her with the only currency that really matters in Wong's movies. He shows her his watch and tells her that she will remember this one minute forever.
Wong shows the last 10 seconds of this minute ticking by on a clock face. It's a simple shot, but it says a lot. First, the most important moments of our lives—like falling in love—can't be measured on a clock face, even if (especially if) we're watching the time. Second, the passage of time is always there to distract us from appreciating these moments. Third, measuring time will not allow us to keep it: that is the imperfect function of memory. And above all, time is elastic. "I used to think a minute could pass so quickly," Su Lizhen confesses later, when all she wants is a moment's peace to forget the caddish Yuddy. "But actually, it can take forever."
Great, I've made the movie sound like watching a bank clock change. Instead, it's an hour-and-a-half of beautiful actors luxuriating in the visual steam bath of Christopher Doyle's ravishing cinematography, awash in shadow and sensual heat, as Wong's scenario meanders from action thriller to tragedy along what will become his familiarly unpredictable path. There's a current trend toward "sandbox" video games that let the player wander anywhere and interact with anything in his virtual environment. Wong's plots are similar in that any stray character can tug the movie in a different direction—like the even-tempered cop (Andy Lau) who consoles Su Lizhen after Yuddy takes up with a slutty showgirl (Carina Lau). Indeed, the enigmatic ending introduces a new character (played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai) whose significance may not even be known until Wong's much later In the Mood for Love and his current 2046—which threads its way back to complete a 14-year circle.
Seen today, Days of Being Wild shows that by his second movie the delirious romantic of Chungking Express and the wistful voluptuary of In the Mood for Love had almost fully formed. The film has a fleeting pop beauty, as if the director had managed to sustain the finger-popping vivacity of the "Madison" sequence from Godard's Band of Outsiders for an entire movie. (The swanky cha-cha soundtrack helps.) His is a cinema of bewitching surfaces over unknowable depths, and each shot offers such sensory delight that its passing leaves a slight pang of regret—which is fitting. The camera zips toward his characters, chasing each moment like a kid with a butterfly net. And time, the butterfly, dances away.
—Jim Ridley
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