Days of Being Wild

Watch for

• The repeated clocks and references to exact moments, turning time into a romantic threat rather than neutral background.
• Christopher Doyle’s first cinematography collaboration with Wong Kar-wai, especially the humid greens and amber interiors.
• Leslie Cheung’s Yuddy shifting between effortless charm and sudden cruelty without changing the surface cool of the performance.
• Tony Leung’s brief final appearance, a fragment of the larger continuation Wong originally imagined.

Production notes

Days of Being Wild was Wong Kar-wai’s second feature and the first film in which the mature Wong style appears almost fully formed. Criterion identifies it as his breakthrough sophomore work and, crucially, his first collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, whose gauzy green-and-gold images became central to the director’s international reputation. The cast is extraordinary in retrospect: Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung circulate through the main story, while Tony Leung appears at the end in what was designed as a bridge toward a continuation. The Hong Kong Film Archive records the film around 95 minutes in restored presentations and notes Leslie Cheung’s Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor. Commercially, however, the original release was a disappointment, and plans for a direct second part did not proceed as intended. That failure is important to the film’s form and mythology. A movie about people unable to reach the futures they imagine literally ends by opening a door to a future film that never arrived, leaving later Wong works to echo its names, time period and emotional architecture instead.

Trivia

• Criterion identifies Days of Being Wild as Wong Kar-wai’s first collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
• Leslie Cheung won Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for his performance as Yuddy.
• The film performed poorly on its initial commercial release despite its star-heavy cast.
• Tony Leung’s short final scene survives from plans for a larger continuation that was never completed in the intended form.
• The name Su Li-zhen and the early-1960s atmosphere later echo through Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love.

Legacy

Days of Being Wild transformed from a commercial disappointment into one of the key films of Hong Kong’s modern canon because it announced a cinema of mood that could be as locally specific as any genre hit and still travel internationally. Wong Kar-wai’s later reputation for fractured time, pop music, voiceover, missed connections and romantic memory is already here, but the film remains looser and more dangerous than the polished melancholy of In the Mood for Love. It also captures an astonishing generation of Hong Kong stars before their images hardened into legend. Leslie Cheung’s Yuddy in particular became one of the defining performances of his screen career, a bad-boy role whose vanity is inseparable from abandonment and self-invention. Criterion now positions the film as the beginning of a loose cycle extending into In the Mood for Love and 2046, while retrospectives routinely treat its initial failure as one of cinema’s great reversals of reputation. For Movie Night, it matters that this canonical status does not make the film feel like homework. It is ninety-some minutes of music, faces, cigarette smoke, clocks and longing arranged with hypnotic confidence.