Days of Being Wild · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the clock. A girl behind a snack-counter, a boy who won't go away, and a wristwatch held up to the light: "One minute before three on the sixteenth of April, 1960. Because of you, I'll remember this one minute." The scene is a seduction, but watch what it actually does. It takes an ordinary instant — nothing happens in it, two people stand near a glass cabinet — and it asks the present to become a keepsake while it is still the present. The minute is lived and mourned at once. That doubling is the whole film, and it is the reason Days of Being Wild belongs to what Gilles Deleuze called the time-image: cinema in which time stops being the measure of action and becomes the thing we look at directly.

In the older cinema Deleuze named the movement-image, a person sees a situation and acts to change it; the cut serves the deed. Yuddy (Leslie Cheung) cannot work that way. He drifts between women, abandons them, learns the woman who raised him is not his mother, and goes to the Philippines to find one who won't see him. None of it resolves anything. He is less an agent than a seer — Deleuze's voyant, the figure who can only watch and endure — and so is everyone around him. Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) is given far more grief than her screen time should hold; Tide the policeman (Andy Lau) keeps a devotion that goes nowhere; Mimi nurses a hunger that never feeds. These are pure optical and sound situations (Deleuze's opsigns and sonsigns): people stranded in front of feelings they can register but not discharge. Patrick Tam's editing enforces it. Scenes begin mid-breath and end before resolution; the connective tissue is gone. That gives you a dispersive situation with weak links — many lives laid side by side, joined laterally rather than by cause — which is exactly the symptom Deleuze diagnosed as the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive.

Yuddy's voyage south is the clearest proof. The trip to find his birth mother is the classic balade — the journey that transforms nothing. He arrives, she refuses him, he is killed on a train almost as an afterthought; violence lands as punctuation, not revelation. A movement-image would have made that death a climax. Here it is just where the line runs out.

What fills the space action used to fill is the face. Doyle's camera pushes in close, holds on immobile reflecting faces, and charges objects and skin with a lyric intensity they don't earn from the plot. This is the affection-image in its purest mode, the qualisign — a feeling held on a face as a single sustained quality, wonder or contemplation or hurt, that never converts into a move. Cheung's solo dance, mambo for an audience of one mirror, is the emblem: a man so sealed inside his own subjectivity that the room, the music, the reflection are all just surfaces of himself.

The mirror matters, because the film's deepest figure is what Deleuze called the crystal-image — the moment when present and its own passing-into-memory can no longer be told apart. The one-minute scene is a crystal: Yuddy manufactures a memory in advance, so that the present is already its own souvenir. The dates Wong keeps inscribing — that 3 p.m., that April — are not flashback markers. They are peaks of present, instants kept simultaneously as now and as already-lost, before and after folded into the same breath. This is the lesson he took from Hiroshima mon amour, where Resnais set two temporal planes co-present without the courtesy of a flashback signal. Wong does the same with a single timeline split across registers that don't emotionally agree.

That is the lineage, and it is precise. Godard's jump cut in À bout de souffle — frames excised inside a continuous shot, on purpose — is the literal ancestor of Tam's unmotivated cuts that drop you between emotional states without losing the room. Antonioni's L'Avventura, where Anna vanishes and the film redistributes its weight onto becalmed survivors, is the template for Yuddy leaving mid-film. The Madison in Bande à part prefigures the mirror dance; Truffaut's refusal to explain a self-destructive boy in Les Quatre Cents Coups prefigures Wong's refusal to excuse Yuddy. He inherited an art and made it Cantonese.

Then the last three minutes. Tony Leung, never seen before, combs his hair in a cramped loft, pockets cash and cards, and steps into the night — a man we instantly want to follow, attached to nothing we've watched. This is the irrational cut, Deleuze's interstice, the "AND" that joins two images across a gap instead of by continuity. It is a door left open onto a film that never came.

What Wong did here was prove that a popular cinema — Cantopop stars, a youth-rebel genre — could carry the full weight of the time-image without turning solemn. He made melancholy structural. Watch it again and time the minute yourself. You'll feel it leave while you're still inside it. That's the whole art.