'Days of Being Wild' is all the more moving seen as a forerunner of this year's sublime 'In the Mood for Love' - Maggie Cheung's character in both films share the same name, so we may assume a continuity, even though in the earlier film she dresses like an average young Hong Kong woman, while in the new one she is in more formal, traditional, constricting dresses.
The similarities between the films go beyond this - both are narratives conjured up in retrospect be male characters, a fact not revealed until the close. In this case, like 'Sunset Boulevard', the narration is posthumous, which may explain the fractured elusiveness of the plot.
The style in this film is much more restrained than in Wong's more famous work, the camera is grounded, slower, constantly blocked (as in 'Mood') by intruding decor, as characters are dwarfed by apartments, rooms, corridors etc. - every time it tries to move, like the characters, it is hampered. Music is more sparing, although it has the required jolting, emotional effect when it does appear. Like 'Mood', though, there are epiphanies, including one extraordinary sequence where the camera appears to float, finally like the bird Leslie Cheung has so often compared himself to, up a railway stairs into a restaurant - ironically, this is the moment that triggers his death, and you can't help wondering if he's deliberately setting it in motion here, freeing himself from being literally grounded.
So although the film is superficially atypical of Wong's oeuvre, 'Days' reads like a statement of intent. Almost all the themes of the future films are here - rootlessness, alienation, the paralysing weight of the past, the stumbling attempts to be free; above all, the evanescence and enigma of emotion; and also recurrent motifs - clocks, mirrors, inchoate voiceovers, coincidences, lost policemen, strangers meeting, cafes. Even the structure is familiar, the shifting relationships between a random group of people, one not always aware of the other, until a revelatory moment of self-awareness. Although the film is darker and less immediately gorgeous than later Wong films, his use of lighting is still extraordinary, the way a conventionally realistic scene is transformed by a transcendent glow of colour, for instance the long walk of Maggie and the policeman, just two people walking and talking, but lit with a phosphorescent green that makes the mundane seem magical; not that the characters are aware of it at the time, but its residue will linger.
For a film in which the past is of crucial importance, and the present so quickly becoming the past, Leslie is the only character with a conventional backstory, and a quest. Caught in a timeless limbo because he does not know where he comes from, he seeks out his mother, perhaps in the hope of acquiring an identity, even a purpose, something different from his fairy-tale upbringing by a wealthy courtesan. This will set him apart from the lost souls he meets on the way, these oneiric figures wandering in the dark, desperate to connect, spurned by his refusal to be grounded. When he fails, he sees no other option but to die.
In this quiet, silent, elliptical film, there are moments of strange, savage violence, not least the chaotic melee in the restaurant, part-parody of martial arts movies (where both stars made their names), part-ripping apart of Leslie's life, a displacement of his inner violence. It is a shocking scene in a beautiful film.
