World of Wong Kar Wai @ Cincinnati World Cinema

Days of Being Wild

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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.

  • Year
    1990
  • Runtime
    94 minutes
  • Language
    Cantonese
  • Country
    Hong Kong
  • Director
    Wong Kar Wai
  • Screenwriter
    Wong Kar Wai, Jeffrey Lau
  • Producer
    Rover Tang
  • Executive Producer
    Candy Leung, Alan Tang
  • Cast
    Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung
  • Cinematographer
    Christopher Doyle
  • Editor
    Patrick Tam, Kai Kit-Was
  • Production Design
    William Chang