Days Of Being Wild Review (page 3)

After this point, the narrative halts and we receive our final revelations: the ‘true’ story of ‘Ah Fei’ - the background to Leslie’s adoption. On a surface level, this appears to provide the traditional comeuppance, heightened by Andy finally losing patience with Leslie. But the situation is more complexly layered. The train scene which marks Leslie’s end - more like an existential waiting room than a form of transport - shows Andy’s character mutate from mere passive observer into a man who wants to live, his hopes contrasted by Leslie who tells him that life is short. Leslie is burned out, but has accepted a fate which holds a degree of certainty and conclusiveness. Andy, on the other hand, is aware of the need for survival, to live, but for what? As he says, there are so many things he has yet to see, but as viewers we are interested in his connection with Maggie. In that direction lies profound uncertainties, not displayed as possibility and hope as in Chungking, but as the potential of living with regret. The juxtaposition of the reason why Leslie was adopted holds a surface shock for the viewer, but it must be remembered that the insertion of the scene is entirely due to the director - it is a revelation which stands independent of the narrative as it unfolds: we don’t know if Leslie ever discovered this truth, and even if he did it would have affected him earlier. What the scene achieves is to put a finality on to the existence of Leslie’s character, as outrageously unexpected as when we first see him. For good or otherwise, we discover Leslie’s ‘roots’, and this gives his character a balance on his exit, emphasised by the scrolling rainforest shot from the beginning of the film.

What then follows amounts to a series of mini epilogues. What they suggest is that the other characters do not have the benefit of the finality which Leslie has opted for. As referred to before, Andy lives on, but his connection with Maggie is hanging in the air - literally, when Maggie decides to call the empty phone box in his absence. Carina Lau arrives in the Philippines, looking for Leslie - but we are not shown what she finds. WKW is obsessively disjunctive here, showing all the various missed chances, expectations and regrets, and then deciding to leave them on a note of discord. For not the last time in his career, WKW foregoes narrative conclusion for the other characters (after all, it is Leslie’s story) - the fulcrum of their story is removed, and we follow them no more.

The final scene is the mysterious coda featuring Tony Leung. Reputedly, he was to be in a sequel to Days which, due to Days’s commercial under-performance, failed to materialise (unless one can regard In The Mood For Love as being a pseudo-sequel). It seems outrageous to place his character, unexplained, on to the end of Days, but WKW does this, giving us one scene in a long take featuring Tony preparing for a night out. What this conveys to viewers is really subject to personal interpretation, but one can surmise that WKW is again suggesting an archetype to act as a fulcrum to a story. Tony’s chancer/gambler moves with a purposeful confidence over the whole scene, each action clear and unhesitating, bringing to mind our first impressions of Leslie. In fact, his presence seems almost to be a proxy for Leslie: a new point around which the other characters and a possible story will revolve: his purposefulness balancing out Leslie’s wayward and aimless self-destruction at the end of the film. This idea of substitution, characterisation by proxy, is prevalent in Days: stepmothers and real mothers, Jacky trying to be a replacement for Leslie, Andy seeking to project Maggie on to those around him. Later, in Ashes WKW expressed the concept succinctly as a displacement of obsession, best seen where Leslie’s character dreams of someone ‘touching’ him in his sleep, the scene melting in to a melange of displaced eroticism.

A concept which continually appears as a subtext in Days is that of commercialism. However, this is not in the sense of capitalist politics but in the far hazier sense of how value is attached to things - conceptions of worth. This may sound too grand at first, but one has to take a WKW viewpoint: rather than singling out commercialism as a force in itself, usually artistically portrayed as a malign force, WKW allows the concept to merge with others in the film, until it shades in with general ideas of worth and value, exchanges of commitment and promise, the reasoning behind actions, gain and loss - ideas prevalent beyond Hong Kong society. If one doubts the existence of such a subtext, it should be noted that WKW was to make references to commercialism more explicit in the later Chungking and Fallen Angels. Whereas those films traded on Hong Kong’s perceived ultra-capitalism, in conjunction with pop values, to make commercialism more apparent, Days - set in a curiously depopulated Hong Kong and in an era invoking nostalgia rather than consumerism - allows the subtext to be more latent.

The core revelation at the film’s denouement, the ‘true story’ of Leslie’s adoption, immediately grabs the viewer with its idea of mercenary self-interest. In this sense, WKW evokes the ordinary reaction to the juxtaposition of values of greed and commercialism; ‘cold’ values, against the ‘warm’ values of love and care which supposedly lie at the heart of relationships. Instinctively, the viewer is thrown into denouncing the relationship as false; tainted with selfish capitalism. This adds to our feel that Leslie’s existence has been all the more worthless. But, as ever, WKW asks one to look deeper, and one soon realises that the idea of commercialism is so widespread and diffuse that it is part of the background to all the characters, rather than being a singular malign force. This is evident from the other relationships in the film, which all hint at a context not far removed from conceptions of value and worth. Consider how Leslie meets Carina, and how the earrings are a token indicator of value there. It is submitted that WKW allows the concept to merge in such a way that there isn’t a scale of commercialism here: as has been argued, the earrings merely form a token, and not a core to a relationship. Looking to the revelation of Leslie’s adoption, this itself doesn’t explain the relationship entirely in selfishly mercantile terms: his stepmother is only promised an income by Leslie’s natural mother until he reaches the age of 18 - so why should his stepmother ever invite him to emigrate with her? This suggests that the mercenary interest is only relevant to part of the connection between Leslie and his stepmother: the formation. From there, it has developed such that she is a mother figure to him, and expects such a relationship - ‘you should treat me nicer’, she says. Despite the suggestion of cold commercial values, WKW hints that the human ends up seeking ‘true’ emotional values.

The displacement of emotion into substitute values can be illustrated by the scene where Jacky, realising his failure in winning Carina’s heart by emulating Leslie, crudely proffers her the proceeds of selling his car. He is so embarrassed he literally slopes off camera. But WKW shows that his failed attempt isn’t the result of cold commercialism: he really does want Carina to love him, but the only way he knows how is to fall back on the common ideas of value, the promise of exchange. The idea is repugnant, and makes us view values of emotion as mutually exclusive with ideas of mercenary value. But this is the most extreme and explicit example: simply because the character has attained such desperation that he seeks to equate the values so crudely. In other examples, WKW presents the commercial interest more subtly, a mere factor bringing the characters together simply because it is part of the background make-up of their society - like when Maggie asks Andy to lend her cash for a bus fare: merely a context where they might otherwise have passed alone. Later, the idea of value is mixed with Andy asking himself what it was that Maggie wanted, merely someone to talk to or something more? The communication of desire is very difficult here, and so one can see why the characters fall back on the certainties of a more mercenary conception of value.