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Days of Being Wild

Ongoing

Dir. Wong Kar-wai. 1990, 94 mins. 35mm. With Leslie Cheung, Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau. Marking Wong Kar-wai’s first film with two of his key collaborators—cinematographer Chris Doyle and set designer William Chang—Days of Being Wild was a box-office disappointment but a runaway critical success, and was soon hailed as a key work of the Hong Kong Second Wave. The first in Wong’s triptych of scintillating unrequited love stories (followed by In the Mood for Love and 2046), Days of Being Wild chronicles the tempestuous relationships between playboy heartbreaker Yuddy and his romantic victims Lulu and Li Su Zhen, celebrating the reckless exuberance of youth while overlaying it with a wistful sense of ephemerality. Personifying Hong Kong’s anticipatory anxieties for its future and a longing tenderness for its past memories, Days of Being Wild is perhaps “cinema’s ultimate unfinished masterpiece” (Sam Ho).



Tickets for Friday evening screenings: $12 ($9 for senior citizens and students / free for Museum members) and includes admission to the Museum’s galleries, which are open until 8:00 p.m.

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