WKW’s second feature is a ravishing, existential journey 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 enamoured 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, 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.  

Notes by David O’Mahony

This screening will be introduced by filmmaker Paul Duane.

Screening as part of The World of Wong Kar Wai season.