Wang Jia Wei / Wong Kar Wai is the man with the strange preference for disillusioned youngsters: people looking for love, maybe for the love of their lifetime, but usually ending up sitting in a barren hotel room staring at the ceiling fan. In the case of his early "Days of being Wild" (1991) this ends more dramatically, of course (being the days of being _wild_ …), but the principle of unidentifiable areas of hope in everybody’s life that one would just need to catch if one could only see it…
It’s not so easy to catch what actually happens: Yuddy (boy) tells Su Lizhen (girl) that, while she insists he buggers off, if she only tried to like him for one minute… which she does, then two minutes, then we find them living almost together. Not quite, because before it gets too close, Yuddy has a tendency to withdraw. Su Lizhen keeps loving him, but ends up with a Policeman who is roaming the streets at night, compulsively walking away his solitude. Yuddy, in the meantime, has found a new admirer for his well-kept hair in Mimi, who is the kind of annoying lower-range showgirl that you would meet in Celebrity Big Brother these days. When Yuddy gets out of there, searching for his mother, but on his quest he finds a supporter…
No seriously, there is not much story about it, and I had to check IMDB in order to get that little bit together (after only 5 days, how sad is that?). But it is the silence of people depending on each other, the lack of articulation when it comes to wanting or not wanting things that appears to be Wong’s theme here. With a cast of brilliantly talented then-young then-new actors, he manages to get this weirdly surreal Hong Kong atmosphere across that has become a bit of his trademark in the years to come.
Review Overview: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101258/externalreviews
thomas4cinema 