Days of Being Wild
Wong Kar-wai's cinema was characterized at the turn of the 2000s by his ability to create powerful images with virtuosity expressing sensations, emotions, and moods. Composing and detailing atmospheres is a work of art exposing at best the symbiotic relationship that sometimes develops between the filmmaker and his director of photography. This cycle includes the very rarely shown The Hand which articulates a diptych with In the Mood for Love.
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 searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman 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. (Janus Films)
Wong Kar-wai
Born in Shanghai in 1958, Wong Kar-wai moved to Hong Kong as a child. For ten years, he was separated from his siblings, blocked in China due to the Cultural Revolution. This personal and collective upheaval undoubtedly permeated his work to come. After his studies, he became a production assistant, and a screenwriter for television. He joined Barry Wong's team, which introduced him to the film industry, and notably wrote the screenplay for Final Victory, directed by Patrick Tam, who also produced his directorial debut, As Tears Go By (1988). By the 1990s, Wong was working with some of Hong Kong's biggest stars. Exploring very different genres, he achieved both critical and popular success with films like Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, and Happy Together, cementing his place on the global stage. He solidified his reputation in the 2000s with In the Mood for Love and 2046. After a brief foray into American cinema (My Blueberry Nights), he reunited with his long-time collaborator Tony Leung, and Hong Kong history in The Grandmaster.
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Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-wai
Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-wai
Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-wai
Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-wai
Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-wai
Days of Being Wild by Wong Kar-wai
