Days of Being Wild

Friday, June 28 - Thursday, July 18, 2024

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 (Leslie Cheung) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau) 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. A Janus Films release.

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Previously screened as part of our retrospective The World of Wong Kar Wai, from August 26 – September 15, 2022.

• Country Hong Kong
• Language In Cantonese with English subtitles
• Year 1990
• Running Time 95 minutes
• Distributor Janus
• Director Wong Kar Wai
• Accessibility Assistive Listening, T-Coil

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