Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Year Released: 1991
Rating: 2.0
If As Tears Go By represents Wong's manic side, Days of Being Wild, his second effort as a director, is his depressive part, the one that's almost entirely consumed with all things morose. Leslie Cheung juggles two different young women but is really hell bent on finding his biological Mom - it's suggested that his gross mistreatment of the opposite sex stems from this lack of a bona-fide 'mother figure.' Flaccid storyline aside, it's arguably the most weary and aloof I've seen Wong - his camera is primarily inert (or more static than usual) and his characters appear particularly lethargic (yes, even more so than Chungking Express - maybe Days of Being Numb is a better title). Later films suggest a happy medium: lost romantic types moving in slow motion while the garish world around them flies by at an accelerated rate - only occasionally do both 'worlds' cross, and when they do (as in the ponderous Ashes of Time or Fallen Angels), it's usually for a spurt of (stylized) violence.
