World of Wong Kar Wai: Days of Being Wild

Days of Being Wild

Hong Kong | 1990 | 94 min. | Wong Kar Wai

June 4 - 7, 2022

World of Wong Kar Wai

Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough sophomore feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. New 4k restoration.

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.

  • Director: Wong Kar Wai
  • Country: Hong Kong
  • Year: 1990
  • Running Time: 94 min.