The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai Days of Being Wild

  • Cinema
  • Playhouse
  • Run time – 94 minutes
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The blueprint for Wong Kar Wai’s acclaimed film In the Mood for Love

Hong Kong | 1990 | Cantonese language with Chinese and English subtitles | Romance/Crime | M

Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough second feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. The first film in a loosely connected, ongoing cycle that includes In the Mood for Love and 2046.

This ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twenty-somethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung) searching for his birth mother, a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a cycle of frustrated desire.

The director’s inaugural collaboration with both cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who lends the film its gorgeously gauzy, hallucinatory texture, and actor Tony Leung, who appears briefly in a tantalizing teaser for a never-realized sequel, Days of Being Wild is an exhilarating first expression of Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing, dislocation, and the restless search for human connection.

Presented by Sydney Opera House

Event details

You don’t follow along so much as feel along…a fascinating ride.

Washington Post

Cast

Wong Kar Wai
Director

Christopher Doyle
Cinematographer

Credits

Leslie Cheung
as Yuddy 

Andy Lau
as Tide

Maggie Cheung
as Su Li-Zhen

Carina Lau
as Leung Fung-Ying

Jacky Cheung
as Zeb

Tony Leung
as Chow Mo-Wan

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Address

Sydney Opera House
Bennelong Point
Sydney NSW 2000
Australia

Getting to the venue

The Opera House is a 7-10 minute walk from Circular Quay, and is easily accessible by car, train, ferry, lightrail, bus, bike and on foot.

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Playhouse

The Playhouse is located in the north-western corner of Sydney Opera House, best accessed through the Western Foyers.

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