Wong Kar Wai - Days of Being Wild
or, dance to this brokenhearted romance
This is a week late. Oops!
Catch up with me:
or, Sexy and Stylish, Kissable and Quiet
This is where Wong Kar Wai begins to become Wong Kar Wai.
Sexy, moody, ethereal, drenched in sweat and rain, soaked with desire and hurt. This first collaboration with Christopher Doyle behind the camera sets the visual and emotional tone for all that will come after. These two go on to define arthouse Hong Kong cinema for decades.
A certain flow to the camera. A quiet, tender, urgency. It’s also where Wong Kar Wai begins to really use music in a deliberate and stylistic way. Though this is Wong’s second movie, it’s really the first with his own style. And this burgeoning style is all about visuals and music, about flow and bodies in motion, trying to look past the many corners of Hong Kong’s streets and corridors.
And this first movie that is distinctly Wong is quiet. Long stretches of the movie happen with only the sound effects of Hong Kong, of people and their absence.
Part of what made me fall in love with this song sung by Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine is the way it felt so true to my own life, and so also true to Wong Kar Wai and all the art I’ve ever loved.
I spent many years of my life living a very stupid life. Hurting myself and others. Being just an absolute catastrophe of a human while I fell in love and broke to pieces at just the gesture of love; so filled with longing was I that I stopped seeing myself or anyone else for what we all were.
We became figments for me, ghosts of shores for me to storm and crash against, no matter the damage done to my body and heart or the bodies and hearts of those on the receiving end of my heartless romanticism, my blatant dandyism, my suffocating need and cataclysmic longing.
Leslie Chung’s Yuddy is so many of us and Maggie Cheung’s Li-zhen is so many standing on the otherside of all that we hoped and longed for. Li-zhen is not a person to Yuddy.
She’s a momentary fascination. A dream. A flirtatious exercise used and discarded when the fun ran its course.
Then he picks up someone new and uses her, allows her to use him. Mimi. She’s a cabaret dancer who is passionate and wild, prone to outbursts and threats. Yuddy’s friend Zeb falls in love with her, too, but she doesn’t return the feeling.
Li-zhen returns and meets Mimi, before leaving quietly once more. She’s comforted by Tide, a policeman working the area. When she can’t sleep, she comes to Yuddy’s neighborhood and talks with Tide. He wants her to move on, to move past Yuddy, maybe even with him. He opens himself to her, tells her to call him at a specific payphone at a general time in the night when he’ll be nearby, but she doesn’t.
Eventually he leaves Hong Kong.
Yuddy then abandons Mimi once he’s done with her and his adoptive mother abandons him. Yuddy goes to the Philippines to find his birth mother, who had abandoned him, who rejects him once he arrives.
Zeb, still in love with Mimi, tries to fill the hole Yuddy left but he can’t. He tells her where Yuddy went and she, too, heads to the Philippines.
Yuddy meets Tide there and disaster follows. Mimi arrives and looks for Yuddy. Then Li-zhen finally calls that empty phonebooth.
This web of people, who hurt each other, who have been hurt, and who don’t know how to find hope, how to heal, how to take that next step that will make them whole.
or, the love we share and the love we don’t
I like to think I was never so cruel, but I don’t know. I cannot know the ways I hurt the people I abandoned in my life.
My capacity to forget has often been a sorrow to those I have loved and whose love I have given up. I have always had a strong inclination to shun and I cannot know exactly how much this has hurt different people who I have known.
For when I shun someone, they cease to be a part of my life. I ignore them and eventually, they fall out of my life. It is not a kind way to behave but I have found it a bad habit in my life. My willingness to abandon people who I perceive to have hurt or wronged me or simply annoyed the shit out of me.
I fell in love with a girl when I was sixteen. She had become my best friend and then so much more to me. But when she found out how I felt, she rejected me. This hurt me, of course, because I am a person with a heart, but once I had nursed my hurt and gotten over it, I found that I had given her up entirely.
Months later, she wanted to meet up and essentially apologize for how she handled things and I forgave her, apologized for the way I behaved. Didn’t even think about it. Mostly I didn’t hesitate to forgive her because I no longer cared. We hadn’t spoken in months and I had moved past hurting to complete indifference.
I gave her a hug and then didn’t speak to her again for three years.
She had reached out to me over facebook our sophomore year of college and I responded so flippantly and indifferently that I didn’t even think about it for longer than the moment it took me to type whatever I typed. In my mind, she didn’t really want to get together.
Why would she?
We hadn’t been friends in years. I had a new life. New people I’d fallen in love with, who I broke my heart against.
A week before I moved to Ireland for a year, I somehow stumbled upon her blog. Probably some idle amount of wandering through the wastes of digitized space until I found a link enticing enough to click.
What glowed back at me from my laptop screen was a post from a few weeks earlier.
It was about me.
It was about her.
It was about pain.
Even remembering how I felt while reading it in 2008 makes my chest seize up. Leaden, my head demands the floor and I want to lie in bed like I did 15 years ago, my heart falling through the floor, through the skin and bones of the earth to sublimate in its molten core.
It was my absence that had caused someone so much pain. And when she had reached out, overcoming her pain, her anxiety, and the barrier of my shunning, I responded as if she was a stranger rather than someone I had spent a year loving.
The next day, I reached out to her.
We’ve been friends since then. Sometimes better and sometimes worse friends. We have a certain kind of love for one another. No longer any sense of romance. That’s something that never sparked again in me. But she has known me a long time and has known me at some of the worst moments in my life.
or, could that life be so simple and beautiful
Days of Being Wild is a fairly simple story of temporary connections and terminally broken hearts. It is more a mood piece than anything else. The plot is overly complicated, I think, and it’s built around vignettes that glide together sometimes awkwardly, but it is that sustained mood that makes the movie work, or fall apart, depending on your disposition.
It’s not a perfect movie and it’s full of the growing pains of a young artist discovering himself, his own language, but it’s a definite improvement over As Tears Go By, though Wong can’t quite shake the genre conventions of the noir, even when it means grafting it clumsily onto a romance.
For me, it mostly succeeds. It’s not quite who Wong will be, nor does it demonstrate what he’ll one day be capable of, but it does show us the type of career he’ll have.
One sustained by a certain mood. Capturing that feeling of almost love, of hearts breaking, and spreading it across two hours, smearing it across a lifetime.
As the kids says, this is a vibe.
Either you’re getting in the car and riding it to a hole in a tree where you’ll whisper your secret or you’ll never know what that’s an allusion to.
But this movie, Days of Being Wild, shows you everything you need to know.
Next month, we’re doing Chungking Express and you get to see the otherside of Wong Kar Wai.
Get Colony Collapse and please review it. I’d appreciate that a lot.
I’m still giving away Howl for free right now.
I’ll also be part of this sale happening over the weekend. I’ll send a brief announcement on Saturday.
