Review of Days Of Being Wild

Introduction

Days of Being Wild is auteur director Wong Kar-Wai`s sophomore effort, and is considered to be the film that marked the true beginning of his distinctive narrative and cinematographic style.

The film is set in 1960`s Hong Kong, a turning point as the city experienced strong economic and population growth, triggering a tremendous wave of social change amongst its inhabitants. Amongst them is Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), a boyishly handsome young man whose abandonment during childhood has left him incapable of feeling love for any of the women in his life. Yuddy strikes up affairs with two women: the ex showgirl Mimi (Carina Lau) and a soft-hearted girl who sells tickets at the local stadium (Maggie Cheung). Despite Yuddy`s indifference, both of these women fall deeply for him - but Yuddy`s cold-heartedness only grows; he soon learns that he cannot show any affection until he completes the task which has preoccupied him all his adulthood: to find his real birth mother.

Video

The video quality is pretty poor quality, directly ported over from a VHS version. Print damage in the form of white flashes, dust and grain are all visible throughout the movie. In addition, the colours often seem muted and the black levels are less than solid. Not the most flattering opinion I know, but in its way this adds to the authenticity of 1960`s Hong Kong.

Audio

Only the dubbed Mandarin mono track is available, and, strangely, the original Cantonese version is not included. I find this quite odd, as the film was shot in Cantonese, and surely it would be no extra effort to include it.

Features

The extras consist solely of a set of film trailers, the only one of which relates to Wong Kar-Wai films is In The Mood For Love.

Conclusion

I always find Wong Kar-Wai films very difficult to review: you only really enjoy as much of them as you are willing to enjoy. His films are so niche, so absent from the usual cinematic conventions of time and space that for every ardent fan of WKW, there are two who feel the films to be incoherent.

So which type does Days of Being Wild fall into; or rather, which type of viewer am I? Actually both: whilst I love In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, I thought 2046 to be a failed experiment and view this film similarly. What I love about WKW`s work is his effort to allow the viewer to fill in the gaps in the relationships, the story - but in Days of Being Wild there is simply not enough story or character development to provide that use of ellipsis. The result is that the pacing is very slow, and WKW`s forte of drawing the audience into a seductive dream is never engaged.

As far as the DVD release goes, there is nothing in the way of extras and the sound and video quality are both well below par, with the original Cantonese track bizarrely left off the disc. Just like the man himself, the release of early WKW films remain a bit of an enigma.