days of being wild (1990)
One of the eternal struggles of being my particular brand of neurodivergent is, of course, having an entire playlist full of movies that I haven't seen and still wanting to explore and find something new to watch in the moment. So for this month's installment of our movie night I drifted through Criterion's list of films, with the vague sense that I wanted to check out something from Hong Kong's cinema, to accompany the short film All the Crows in the World (2021) (which is on Criterion and Kanopy and some other services and I found immensely fun). I stumbled on Days of Being Wild, Wong Kar Wai's 1990 film, which I had previously seen in some other collection, and decided to check it out. There is a magic in serendipity. Some spoilers below.
This is a story set in 1960s Hong Kong about the disaffected, the down-and-out, the people who live in the cracks, a story told through claustrophobic cinematography, a story about a guy who really, really sucks. As with many of my favorite stories, it's a lot of narrative strands that variously twist together and veer apart. The narrative is anchored around a playboy named Yuddy; he fancies himself tragically free, telling a story of a kind of bird that has no legs and has to keep flying forever or it will die. He's not, of course: he seems to be driven by a fundamental emptiness that he dreams of filling by seducing women and, when he finds that the emptiness remains, abandoning them to move onto the next one. We follow his story, the story of the women whose lives he's worsened by being in them, the story of his mother, the story of his friend, the story of the cop who hangs out at his building.
To some degree or other everyone in this story is fixated on the past, trying to recapture something that may have never been there at all; some seem able to move on, while others let their longing for the past consume them, drive them to irrational or self-destructive behavior. There is no happiness to be found in their tragic nostalgia, only a resigned contentment: it happened, and now it's gone, and whether we like it or not we have to keep moving.
I love the cinematography in this film: all tight shots and dilapidated buildings, and beautifully moody shots of rainy Hong Kong at night. It perfectly captures the mood of people drifting through their lives trying to find some meaning in a world that seems, largely, to not care about them. All of these nocturnal scenes are particularly apt here: by day these characters might not be unraveling, but at night it's easy to let the mask slip.
The description of this movie, and the serendipity of running into it multiple times, sang to me, and it did not disappoint: I love stories like this. I am told it is part of a loosely connected trilogy and I am looking forward to finding time to explore the rest of them.