Days of Being Wild
The first movie directed by Wong Kar-wai was 1988's ''As Tears Go By," a halfhearted Hong Kong crime drama that tossed out bits of undigested ''Mean Streets" plot amid the occasional burst of raw feeling. Three years later, the director made his second film, ''Days of Being Wild," which receives its much-delayed Boston premiere at the Museum of Fine Arts today. It was, and remains, a masterpiece.
Wong's best-known film is still 2000's ''In the Mood for Love," with its hothouse mixture of suppressed yearning and unrepressed art direction. ''Days of Being Wild" feels like an earlier companion piece, with similar themes of throttled communication and love never arriving at the right time in the right place.
Additionally, ''Days" has a figure of immense and doomed charisma in the late, great Leslie Cheung, whose performance here carries some of the impact of Jean-Paul Belmondo in ''Breathless" or James Dean in ''Rebel Without a Cause." Before he threw himself off a building to his death in 2003, Cheung brought a weary allure to such films as ''Farewell, My Concubine," ''Happy Together," and ''A Chinese Ghost Story." Here he plays a helpless rake adored by everyone he meets, none of whom can save him from himself.
Pulsing with radiant colors and a mocking slack-key guitar score, ''Days" opens with Yuddy (Cheung) seducing So Lai-Chun (Maggie Cheung), a bored stadium food seller, slowly, day by day. By the end of the first week, we're in thrall too, partly due to cinematographer Christopher Doyle's eye for humid beauty and partly because Yuddy seems so entwined with the idea of love that he can barely see his new lover. Or the lover after that, a cynical bar dancer named Mimi (Carina Lau) who falls for him against her own good sense and who throws petulant tantrums and shoes when he ignores her.
Behind these two is the figure of Yuddy's adoptive mother (Rebecca Pan), an aging, alcoholic courtesan who comes with a gigolo Yuddy's only too happy to beat up; behind her is the nebulous shadow of his real mother, who gave him up for reasons the son has never learned. Any Freudian issues take a back seat to the film's intensely felt visual poetry and the hero's headlong rush into the void. Male friends -- a raffish street hustler (Jacky Cheung) in love with Mimi, a cop who'd rather be a sailor (Andy Lau) -- offer no relief. Everyone wants what they can't have in this movie, except for Yuddy, who wants nothing and everything and understands them to be much the same.
There are images in ''Days" that can make your heart stop for no other reason than that they're perfect: a shot of Yuddy and So lying in a post-coital haze, a camera move up a long, deep blue staircase into a Philippine lunch-hall where violence will erupt. But the visuals wouldn't have the impact they do without the sense that they're glimpsed once and gone forever, and that their loss will haunt the characters for the rest of their lives.
The image is where emotion lies in both movies and memory -- Wong understands this as much as Jean-Luc Godard ever did -- and it's a well from which filmmaker, characters, and audience can drink until they're intoxicated and yet still be thirsty. ''Days of Being Wild" shows Wong discovering his own cinematic language, and he's as astonished as we are.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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