Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 1990 • Hong Kong
Starring Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing, Andy Lau Tak Wah, Maggie Cheung Man Yuk
The breakthrough sophomore feature by Wong Kar Wai represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. The initial entry 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 twentysomethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau Tak Wah) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a dance 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 Chiu Wai, 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.
Up Next in Directed by Wong Kar Wai
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The Hand
Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 2004 • Hong Kong
Starring Gong Li, Chang Chen, Feng TienLike IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, THE HAND is set in the hazy Hong Kong of the 1960s, but its characters couldn’t be more different from the earlier film’s restrained, haunted lovers. Originally conceived for the omnibu...
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Fallen Angels
Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 1995 • Hong Kong
Starring Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Leon Lai MingLost souls reach out for human connection amid a glimmering Hong Kong in Wong Kar Wai’s hallucinatory, neon-soaked nocturne. Originally conceived as a segment of CHUNGKING EXPRESS only to spin of...
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Hua yang de nian hua
Directed by Wong Kar Wai • 2000 • Hong Kong
This 2000 short film by Wong Kar Wai was made entirely out of print elements discovered in a California warehouse. It is set to Zhou Xuan’s song “Hua yang de nian hua.”
