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Movie review: ';Days of Being Wild';
By Michael Wilmington
, z) Z: k. C/ y4 Z1 ATRIBUNE MOVIE CRITIC

2 Q9 h: T$ @& s5 p1 ^+ f4 stars (out of 4)
, x0 f2 [4 A) }4 C8 F/ P, cLost in a haze of voluptuous shadows and flickering lights on glowing flesh, the main characters of Wong Kar-Wai';s neglected classic "Days of Being Wild" are five reckless youths in 1960 Hong Kong, enslaved by passion and illusion, along with an aging "mother" who knows some of the truth behind the lies.
Sometimes cinema';s highest achievements become clear only in retrospect. "Days of Being Wild"—now clearly revealed as one of the peaks of Hong Kong filmmaking and a masterwork of contemporary cinema giant Wong—was a commercial and critical flop on its 1991 Hong Kong release and ignored or low-rated afterwards in America. Yet in this current re-release by Kino International, which also included the movie in its superb DVD set featuring five films by the director, we can see how important Wong';s second feature was to Asian and world film history and how crucial to penetrating his steamy, impassioned art and worldview.
% r! @  _& S7 r" }. m1 @8 A. B. [With a cast of young actors who eventually became Asian and world superstars—including Andy Lau and three Cheungs, Maggie, Jacky and the late Leslie (who played the transvestite theater actor in "Farewell My Concubine")—as well as fiery images crafted by the great visual team of director-writer Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, "Days" now seems a triumph of movie pop poetics.
) O3 Y+ t5 O* W! f# F) fThe settings are Hong Kong and the Philippines in 1960, and the tale so wildly romantic that it sears our imaginations. The main character is a seductive young gangster named Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), the magnetic force in a group that also includes his two girlfriends—frostily beautiful bartender So Lai-Chun (Maggie Cheung) and pert dancer/showgirl/bar girl Mimi (Carina Lau)—along with Yuddy';s shady pal Zeb (Jacky Cheung), lovelorn cop Tide (Andy Lau) and Yuddy';s nameless adoptive mother, a regal-looking former hooker (Tita Munoz).
" ^2 `9 F6 C5 j$ S1 j: ["Days" begins with a scorching erotic encounter between Yuddy and So, which is ignited by an evocation of time (Yuddy';s request for a mere minute';s relationship) and ends with the two entangled in the sheets. All the other main characters are also, it seems, aroused or galvanized by the effortlessly sexy Yuddy—and Tide and Zeb are in love with, respectively, So and Mimi. Yuddy himself is obsessed primarily with finding the birth mother who abandoned him, whom he eventually tracks to a fate- and doom-ridden climax in the Philippines.
With almost palpable heat and an intense noirish visual style, the film records the erotic encounters and peregrinations of this promiscuously entwined group. They';re all wanderers, originally from different geographical locations: Shanghai, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Macao. And Yuddy';s flight from the beds of Hong Kong to family reckoning in the Philippines echoes a myth he recounts of a bird who flies constantly and only lands once—at his death.
All these actors are great camera subjects. But, quite deliberately, Leslie Cheung';s performance as Yuddy is intended to evoke that eternal symbol of alienated adolescence, James Dean. The Hong Kong title of "Days of Being Wild" more accurately translates as "The Story of Rebellious Youth," which is the most common Hong Kong title translation for Dean and Nick Ray';s 1955 classic "Rebel Without a Cause."
, P2 G) N$ W* D5 [) B$ M8 V5 zLike Dean';s Jim Stark in "Rebel," Yuddy is a seeming hood-hedonist who is actually locked in a painful quest for identity and family love, and "Days," like "Rebel," breaks your heart with its violent poetry. The visual style, arranged in four distinct acts oscillating between intense closeups and long, complex tracking shots, is drenched in darkness, trapping the lovers, friends and enemies in Wong';s vision of the past. And, as always for this very time-obsessed filmmaker ("In the Mood for Love," "Ashes of Time," "Chungking Express"), we are made constantly aware in the story of both remembrance of things past and the remorseless flow of present time.
$ E. |4 f- E6 x. k/ eThe current power of Wong';s "Days of Being Wild," of course, is augmented by a different kind of nostalgia, including our views of these eventual Hong Kong filmmaking and acting greats in their incandescent youth—and especially our sight of the young Leslie Cheung, more than a decade before his suicide in 2003. Like Dean, the much more prolific Leslie died relatively young. But he also leaves some classics of youthful romance behind, most particularly "Days of Being Wild," this gorgeous story of rebellious youth. As we watch, fire and flesh, passion and the past leap from the screen.

天是红河岸

<纽约时报>文章
The New York Times
: {. s& l! J1 u0 ]7 @- h& i+ ?) ULong-Overdue Release for a Triumph of 1991
; i: |/ R( M* B/ ]3 @1 {0 W( M3 V( RBy MANOHLA DARGIS
: D, F/ E- k1 `: Y9 c% U9 \/ @Published: November 19, 2004
"Days of Being Wild," a rapturous film about cool men, hot women and the thousand and one nights and cigarettes they share, was the second feature directed by Wong Kar-wai and the Hong Kong visionary';s first undisputed triumph. In 1991 the film wowed New York critics when it screened at the New Directors/New Films series, though apparently not enough critics, or just not the most influential, to secure it domestic distribution.
Since then, of course, Mr. Wong has become one of the most important filmmakers in the world, which partly explains why and how this dazzling jewel is finally receiving its long-overdue theatrical release in this country. It opens today at the Film Forum in Manhattan.
Set in Hong Kong in 1960, "Days of Being Wild" centers on a well-heeled bounder named Yuddy, sensitively played by Leslie Cheung. (A radiant presence in Chinese cinema during the 1980';s and 90';s, Mr. Cheung committed suicide last year.) The film opens with Yuddy sauntering up to the stadium counter where So Lai-Chun (Maggie Cheung) works, popping open a bottle of Coca-Cola and telling the startled woman that tonight she';ll see him in her dreams. True to his word, Yuddy soon bewitches So Lai-Chun, a seduction that works itself out on the level of the filmmaking as well. Mr. Wong turns out to be as much a smooth operator as his young protagonist, and as he floods the screen with beauty and fills the soundtrack with hypnotic rhythms, he forges a filmmaking style of incomparable eroticism.
At first, Yuddy and So Lai-Chun';s affair is a dream they share. Lying in bed in a post-coital haze, the two seemed as stoned on sex as each other, barely able to lift either their eyelids or limbs. Time passes even as it also seems to stand still and eventually the love-drug wears off, at least for Yuddy. The feckless heartbreaker takes up with a showgirl, Mimi (the irrepressibly charming Carina Lau), who tumbles for him as hard as So Lai-Chun did. The women draw circles around Yuddy even as he reserves most of his passion for his mysterious foster mother (Tita Mu&ntilde;oz). Meanwhile, desire continues to ricochet among the characters as Yuddy';s friend Zeb (Jacky Cheung) falls for Mimi and a street cop, Tide (Andy Lau), directs his gaze at So Lai-Chun.
A film about beauty, time, longing and many different shades of green, "Days of Being Wild" was the first film in which Mr. Wong';s vision took full bloom and the first in which he worked with his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Even so, traces of the director';s voluptuous style were evident even in his debut feature, the 1988 release
"As Tears Go By." Shot during the period in which Hong Kong directors were reinventing the action movie, this film includes scenes of gang violence but mostly concerns the interior lives of two hoods and the woman who loves one of them. This time the bewitched lovers are played by Mr. Lau and Ms. Cheung, faces still rounded by baby fat, while the odd man is again played by the sympathetic Jacky Cheung.
. ?, k# O  u; G$ M5 k7 r& ?5 C"As Tears Go By" has something of a plot, but Mr. Wong was clearly already more interested in surfaces, textures, hot and warm colors and bodies in fast and slow motion than either story or genre. Several years later when he made "Days of Being Wild," he had more or less dispensed with the architecture of the classically constructed, three-act linear story. Instead of bad boy meets good girl, kiss-kiss, bang-bang and they live
unhappily ever after, with "Days of Being Wild" Mr. Wong created a universe of heavenly bodies in continuous, inexorably isolated revolution. As in his first film, the men and women in "Days of Being Wild" fall in love, but now they are imprisoned rather than liberated by desire. For them, love is the drug, but it';s also the habit.
& l- N) d8 g* p, A2 e+ YThwarted desire has become something of a fixation for Mr. Wong, who has essentially told this same story in each of his successive features. The filmmaker has admitted as much about his three features set in the 1960';s, including the swoony romance "In the Mood for Love" (released in 2000) and the equally romantic "2046," which received its premiere at the Cannes film festival in May. "I think ';Days of Being Wild,'; ';In the Mood'; and ';2046'; all fit in one continuous story," Mr. Wong said in an interview published in Time Asia. "It would be very interesting to put ';Days'; and ';Mood'; together with ';2046'; and let it become a complete story. If we think ';Days'; is a chapter of ';2046,'; and ';Mood'; is a chapter of ';2046,'; then ';2046'; is the complete story."
8 U  D2 X8 x3 W- w/ L0 rIt has often been noted that while Mr. Wong has become famous or infamous, depending on who';s doing the talking, for his improvisational shooting methods, he began working in the movie industry as a screenwriter. That apparent paradox has been occasionally used against the writer and director as proof of his putative inability to tell a story. In truth, what makes Mr. Wong one of the most exciting filmmakers in cinema and makes his work
more than just the sum of its cinematography and production design is that he';s one of the few artists working outside the avant-garde who has been able to liberate his films from the straitjacket of conventional narrative. Beginning with "Days of Being Wild" Mr. Wong started creating some of the most beautiful films ever made and some of the most free.

天是红河岸

The Village Voice
A very Wong engagement:
Time-traveling between an imaginary past and
an eternal now As Years Go By
By J. Hoberman
8 [" P4 s% V; u. X) o; i# d- b  hNovember 15th, 2004
Days of Being Wild is the movie with which Wong Kar-wai became Wong Kar-wai—the most influential, passionate, and romantic of neo-new-wave directors. Wong called his second feature "a reinvention of the disappeared world." Like most of his films, Days of Being Wild might be called In Search of Lost Time; in a sense, its belated New York theatrical premiere is time regained.
Arguably this is the key movie in Wong';s oeuvre, as startling in its context as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Breathless were in theirs. Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons—Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Andy Lau, and briefly, Tony Leung—acting like movie stars. Days is also Wong';s first film to have been shot by Chris Doyle, and the voluptuous shadows, neon color schemes, and underwater atmosphere of Doyle';s cinematography would define Wong';s elusive Hong Kong forever after.
) e0 k* v% i; N; y/ bSet around the same period as American Graffiti (or Edward Yang';s retro youth epic A Brighter Summer Day, made in Taiwan the next year), Days of Being Wild makes similar use of dated cool and old cars. The very first shot smacks your eye with a redder-than-red Coca-Cola cooler. The title evokes the one under which Rebel Without a Cause was released in Hong Kong. But this is an unfamiliar and perhaps imaginary nostalgia. In his film notes, Wong reminisces about 1960: "I used to recall, back in those days, the sun was brighter, the air fresher, with distant noises from wireless sets flowing down the streets. . . . One felt so good it was almost like a dream." For him it was: He was born in Shanghai in 1958 and moved to H.K. with his family at age five.
Suavely achronological, Days opens with a tracking shot through some verdant jungle that cannot be temporally identified until the movie';s gangster-flick finale. Everything else is flashback. Moving from small, humid rooms to rigorously controlled exteriors, the principals suggest a group of time travelers transported into a past that can';t be inhabited.
2 q* B* @% T6 x) B0 A3 q# M4 yThe empty stadium where Maggie Cheung works the concession counter might be ruins. The youthful demographic further abstracts the universal obsession with personal history. Leslie Cheung';s character, a pomaded lady-killer and underworld tough, is the only one with a parent; that she is his adoptive mother only serves to render him more a little boy lost.
Leslie Cheung';s character is searching for something unknown left behind in an unknowable time. But those familiar with Wong';s subsequent films will find that his preoccupations are all in place—veiled by a delicate fog of fleeting relationships, unfulfilled longings, and missed opportunities. Here too are his characteristic strategies—the cast of beautiful loners, the memories delivered in voice-over, the abstractly exotic music. (Save for one Django Reinhardt piece, the Hawaiian cha-cha score comes from a compilation album by Xavier Cugat.) In the Mood for Love very nearly remakes Days of Being Wild—and the as yet unreleased 2046 even more so. In some respects, however, Days is a more radical achievement than those that would come later.
For one thing, there';s a headier sense of simultaneity. Difficult to follow on a first viewing (although not thereafter), the movie may feel shifty as smoke, but it';s composed entirely of straight cuts. The various flashbacks and flash-forwards are marked by abrupt transitions that give no indication of elapsed time. This succession of privileged moments is less evocation of the past than nostalgia for the present. Time is fragmented in the service of an Eternal Now, and yet there';s a Zeno';s paradox effect in which that Now instantly evaporates. Clocks are ubiquitous, and the key scene has Leslie Cheung';s character seduce Maggie Cheung';s by tricking her into spending a minute constructing a memory of those 60 seconds.
/ m& }+ {: y  ]# }2 {8 c& {Wong originally wanted a Days of Being Wild sequel haunted by its dead protagonist. Leslie Cheung';s untimely passing renders that ambition additionally poignant. But as in all of Wong';s movies, you can';t go home again.

feeling0713

全英文的，如果有时间，我都会细细睇过。