Days Of Being Wild Review (page 2)

But on the other hand, the characters have a freedom of choice, as nothing is for granted they can pick and choose relationships at will. The irony is that they seldom manage to make choices which reflect logic or fulfilment, and in the end they often revert to solitude again. In Leslie’s case, he seduces and dumps his women, fearing intimacy, but cannot do the same with his stepmother. She is the only one who can find his natural mother - a fact preventing his escape, but one which she suggests he is merely hiding behind. The truth is that Leslie truly does have a life mission to find his mother, but it is also merely his excuse, holding him in stasis. The mother figure is important in his life, not least because it is a figure of blame, and he feels he merely has a substitute. In the end, his quest to find his mother results in his downfall: he has to face the reality of rejection a further time - his shield of hope destroyed by truth. His downfall thereafter is spectacular, as he is then shorn of reason and drive. His subsequent actions - violent and irresponsible, are unlimited extensions of his earlier persona, but now with a purposelessness which makes his previously latent death-wish more apparent than ever. In a way, this gives us insight into the nature of his character: marked by rejection, he resolves to reject all those around him. In Ashes Of Time, Leslie’s character says that, to avoid rejection he learnt to reject others first. Here, Leslie employs such a measure of emotional protection, but ends up succumbing to the hope of acceptance. The result of rejection is devastating for him, and drives him over the edge.

Leslie’s most fascinating conceit is of the ‘bird with no legs’. He likens himself to such a creature, flying until the day it dies. The projection of mortality makes his death-wish apparent, but this is disguised by the idea, inherently impermanent yet fantastically ephemeral, of flying free. Such freedom reflected concepts important to Hong Kong and its citizens when the film was being made: whether to stay in the territory destined to change, or to leave for destination unknown. For Leslie, such freedom is a concept always nearby, from the moment he strolls in carrying his Pan-Am bag, to when he disastrously attempts to obtain an American passport. But he is constrained by his past: scars of memory making him who he is. When asked about his plans he speaks of ‘uncertainties’ - always the open possibilities of the future. But he has kept this trammelled by his mission to find his mother - a mission to find some type of certainty, perhaps a meaning.

By presenting these concepts, WKW acknowledges the double-edged nature of freedom: the openness of possibilities being both uplifting and frightening. It is notable that when we cover Leslie’s downfall, WKW takes an ambiguous line, not favouring a truly moral viewpoint. The crowning moment of this is when the camera ‘floats’ up the stairs at the dilapidated train station in the Philippines, a latinized beat defining the rhythm as we approach Leslie in the canteen area. Here, we find him casually dancing between the jukebox and the confused figure of Andy Lau’s character. Leslie looks shabby and dishevelled, but in no way lost or uncertain. He truly looks free here compared to the relatively restrained dance he performs to the mirror in his apartment. It is as if he has become the bird he refers to. WKW presents this even though this is Leslie’s downfall, a matter which other filmmakers might present as inevitably depressing. But in Leslie’s case, he has attained some kind of certainty about his future (even if it will certainly be messy), and so revels in the freedom of the present. How far can such a concept extend in metaphor? The idea of transience is never far from the definition of Hong Kong, and the train station canteen reflects this as being a waystation, a point of impermanent waiting before moving on. The parallel with Hong Kong would be made more explicitly by WKW in the final scene of the later Fallen Angels.

Days has been called a ‘chamber drama’, probably as much of the film involves dialogue between two characters in private, preserving a feel of intimacy. At this stage, WKW’s use of the monologue was still embryonic, although when it does occur, it hits the spot emotionally without being cryptic. The result of the dialogue-heavy structure is that the film feels very much like a ‘web’ of relationships, some only obliquely affecting others. Some might feel that the late inclusion of further characters, like Andy Lau’s introspective cop, adds to confusion and lack of priority, but the true feeling one gets is that the web of connections is approaching stifling point. The contrast is that Leslie is entirely uninterested in such complications: he finds his relationships as and when he wants them. In the end, this is another factor which highlights his hankering for some kind of freedom and simplicity: he quits Hong Kong with no desire to return, and in the end he tells Andy not to tell Maggie that he remembered her as he had promised after his ‘one minute friends’ speech - to give the impression of amnesia, to break his promise and leave the world unconnected to anyone is, to his mind, ‘better for everyone’. This is a philosophy which WKW was to revisit later in Ashes Of Time.

Andy Lau’s character is not really a ‘follower’ of Leslie’s. He enters the narrative when a ‘gap’ arises; consoling a distraught Maggie who seems unable to break free of her unrequited obsession with Leslie after he has dumped her. His character is introspective and not prone to expressing his emotions to others, reflecting Tony Leung in the later Chungking Express. His connection with Maggie ends in something little more than embryonic: perhaps she ‘only needed someone to talk to’. For all intents and purposes, this offshoot of narrative, a complete contrast of flavour, should not reflect on Leslie’s story. But WKW contrives a connection in the second half of the story, relocating Andy and Leslie to the Philippines. Andy truly does contrast with Leslie here in that his mother has just died, and he ‘goes to the sea’, to take his dream vocation as a sailor, something he couldn’t do before as he had to look after his mother. We know so little of Andy’s background that we don’t know what he is striving towards, or what he wishes to leave behind. He is as much a wayward soul as Leslie, but his drives are hidden, seemingly yet to be encumbered with social complexities. All we do know is that he has walked out on any possibility of getting to know Maggie better. In this sense, he is a projection of the ‘rejection’ philosophy expounded by Leslie. But WKW feels compelled to point to how things can never be so simple - there is an inherent bittersweet regret which attends such unfulfilled solipsism. The contrivance is that Andy picks up Leslie when he finds him in the gutter - Leslie not recognising him - and seeks slowly to indulge his curiosity.

The interesting thing about Andy’s character is that we end up connecting him to Maggie rather than any life he has ahead of him. When he says that there are still many things he wants to see, in response to Leslie’s query as to what he’d like to see on his death, we have to agree with Leslie’s retort that, ‘the sea’s boring anyway’. To us, as soon as Andy arrives at his hotel he meets a young woman who, by clothing and hair, brings Maggie to mind. Then he picks up Leslie, a connection to Maggie. Once again, WKW shows us how the memory, our active connection to the past, is forever re-engaging past emotions, inseverable yet unreachable. Andy ends up connected to his past by the proxy of Leslie, finding out that Leslie has fulfilled his promise to remember Maggie and the minute they spent together. Ironically, he causes Leslie to think of Maggie on his death, thus recalling his belief that he wouldn’t know which woman he loved most until he died.