Rebels and Conformists: DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990)

One of the most memorable moments in The Conformist (1970), Bernardo Bertolucci’s seductively beautiful study of Fascism, comes early in the film, as the titular antihero’s fiancée, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), dances for him in her Rome apartment. As the camera turns to follow Giulia’s movements, music plays on a phonograph and light streams in from the lowered venetian blinds, casting askew patterns onto the walls which match the plunging black-and-white diagonals of her dress. These several seconds of film stand out as just one of the most vivid examples of the tone that Bertolucci and his key collaborators, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Fernando Scarfiotti, managed to create throughout The Conformist. Essentially, their achievement is a sense of a total integration of design, a total fusion of filmmaking elements that today, after several decades’ worth of heavily designed spectacles, impresses all the more with its grace and slightly chilly detachment.

A similar scene occurs about twenty minutes into a movie made two decades later, Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990). Up to this point, the film has followed its young protagonist, Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), in his amorous adventures, seducing first a shy waitress, Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), and then a nightclub dancer, Leung Fung-ying (Carina Lau). At this moment, however, the camera observes Yuddy, alone in his dark, cluttered apartment as he starts to dance, following him with the same kind of sinuous movement as in The Conformist, and to the musical accompaniment of a similar flavor of tropical-flavored pop. The affinity between the two scenes doesn’t come simply from their content, which is not so unusual, but from the similar, stylishly languorous notes that they strike.
I don’t know that Wong Kar-Wai has ever acknowledged Bertolucci as an influence, and I’ve never heard or read any other comparison between these two movies. Certainly, the peak of The Conformist’s acknowledged influence was in early 1980s Hollywood, when glossy stylishness had become newly fashionable, and directors liked to draw on Storaro’s Wellesian, noirish visuals and their Fascistic associations to invoke an ominous, decadent mood. In Blade Runner, for instance, Ridley Scott and his cameraman, the late great Jordan Cronenweth, used those same bars of filtered light for Harrison Ford and Sean Young’s love scene. Paul Schrader, meanwhile, practically imported The Conformist wholesale by bringing Fernando Scarfiotti out to L.A. for American Gigolo. Days of Being Wild’s citation of the Italian film, if it is one, is less brazen. Where it more fully evokes The Conformist, intentionally or not, is in that same sense of removed nostalgia, a tone which novels commonly evoke but which appears less often in the movies.
Wong Kar-Wai’s nostalgia is for early 1960s Hong Kong, which he depicts in Days of Being Wild and in the later In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) as a lost world, more elegant and ritualized than our present. The characters of these films are like refugees from the classic Hollywood melodramas and “women’s pictures” of the forties and fifties, more devoted both to the trappings of the good life and to the constraints of social convention. His films about contemporary Hong Kong and its inhabitants, meanwhile, seem closer in spirit to the New Wave films actually being made in the 1960s. The people in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together are just as romantic and obsessed with past heartbreak as those in Kar-Wai’s lush period pieces, but in a very nineties context of cultural free-fall, apparently porous national and personal identities and constant restlessness. Kar-Wai did return to the present in 2007’s My Blueberry Nights, his disappointingly conventional English-language debut, but otherwise his interests have seemed, since the start of the new millennium, more directed towards the past. In addition to Wong Kar-Wai’s 1960s films, in recent years he’s released a revised cut of his 1994 wuxia martial-arts epic Ashes of Time and has been working on a new film, The Grand Master, about Bruce Lee’s mentor in the 1950s.
Wong Kar-Wai’s romantic view of the pre-1968 world is hardly unique among filmmakers, who are frequently drawn to the idea that this time was, if not more innocent, less self-conscious. What’s more unusual and compelling is the personal quality of his fascination. He moved to Hong Kong with his parents in 1963, when he was only five, and it’s easy to imagine that the dreamlike images of his movies about that period could have started with a child’s hazy impressions of his unfamiliar new home.
I don’t find all of Wong Kar-Wai’s work equally compelling. Ashes of Time, I am ashamed to admit, defeated my efforts to sit through it, and as a general rule his mannered style and obsession with lost love and lost time can be difficult to work your way into, if always easy to admire as the work of talented people. Days of Being Wild is not as highly finished as most of his later movies and, in the grainy DVD mastering which I was able to see, is certainly not as pretty. Despite all of that, it might also be my favorite among his films, with a sense of freshness and discovery in how boldly and directly it drops the viewer into its imagined past world.
The movie begins without any scene-setting or fanfare. The camera keeps pace behind Yuddy as he walks down an otherwise empty hallway, on his way to seduce Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) at the stadium concession stand where she works. These early scenes could almost be from a more average, conventional “coming-of-age” story, as is suggested by the origins of the title, which was first used for the Chinese-language release of Rebel without a Cause (1955). One of the first signs that the movie will be about more than “the summer they could never forget” comes when Yuddy decides to make the girl his “one-minute friend.” This scene is better seen than described, but, suffice to say, it’s a typical Wong Kar-Wai moment, combining the grave and the whimsical, finding something permanent in the ephemeral.

That the movie has little interest in presenting a feel-good story of personal growth becomes clear as we learn more about its protagonist. As played by the late Leslie Cheung, Yuddy is effortlessly charming and charismatic, with a sense of boyish vulnerability like that of Montgomery Clift, but with an underlying coldness that seems distantly related to the raging, predatory character David Thewlis would play three years later in Naked. It seems clear that something’s off with Yuddy after he abruptly rejects the gorgeous Maggie Cheung, moving on to Carina Lau’s dancer. The script doesn’t try to make much of a Rosebud out of the character’s emotional problems, revealing early that Yuddy was abandoned by his birth mother, who went on to live in the Philippines, and was raised by a former call girl (Rebecca Pan), who did not hide that her interest in him came primarily from the reward she was paid in return. At heart, he’s a little lost boy, and the character’s quest is, theoretically, to be reunited with his absent mother, but Wong Kar-Wai treats this in an offhand way. His characters are rarely goal-driven in the way generally dictated by commercial filmmaking.
As with Wong Kar-Wai’s later movies, the storyline of Days of Being Wild is far from the most interesting or significant thing about it. There’s a danger in working this way, as became clear in My Blueberry Nights, where the road-movie format closes in on itself in a loop without ever going to any particularly interesting places. When thinking back on Days of Being Wild, what I remember is the dreamlike, almost eerie picture it creates of Hong Kong. Wong and his great cinematographer Christopher Doyle render the city with a stifling, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. For much of the time, it seems emptied out of people, without the bustling crowds and elaborate production design typically used in period films. This decision may have come in part from budgetary limitations, but it also helps to suggest that Wong Kar-Wai is not showing much more than what his characters, who are mostly in their twenties, remember seeing from that time. In the Mood for Love and 2046 embrace more brilliant, varied color schemes, and boast more elaborate costume and set designs, but Days of Being Wild is beautiful and hypnotic in its own right. In the absence of an overabundance of period detail, Christopher Doyle bathes many of the scenes in a green glow, a simple but effective way of suggesting the idea of “the past.”
One of the odd things about that affinity between The Conformist and Days of Being Wild, if there is anything to it, is that Wong Kar-Wai’s movie takes place closer to when The Conformist was shot than to when it was set. This kind of mix-up of chronology seems appropriate for a director who would later, in 2046, confuse whether the number represented a hotel room where lovers could meet or the year in the future when they could be reunited. It may also contain a clue as to why, at the same time as Wong Kar-Wai so shamelessly and egregiously fetishizes the past, he can also transcend what might have been no more than an indulgence. That the same languid atmosphere and moody visuals could evoke such different eras and places so well suggests that, ultimately, the films are less about a particular time that happens to be past than it is about the process of memory. So, for that matter, is the fact that one of the defining obsessions for an artist could be nostalgia for a time and place that he could not, in fact, remember.