Days of Being Wild

In Hong Kong in 1960, Yuddy starts relationships with women, leaves them, and looks for the mother who abandoned him. Its most famous line concerns a minute: he tells a woman they spent the minute before three o'clock on 16 April 1960 together, and that the minute can never be erased. It is Wong Kar-wai's second film and his first collaboration with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, a partnership that ran for decades. Despite carrying the biggest Hong Kong stars of the moment it failed commercially, taking 9,751,942 Hong Kong dollars locally. That became typical of Wong's later work too. The final scene stayed a riddle. A man played by Tony Leung gets ready in a small room, leaves, and is never seen again. It was the opening of a sequel that was planned and never shot. Critics later identified him with Chow Mo-wan from In the Mood for Love and 2046, and the three films came to be treated as an informal trilogy. At the 10th Hong Kong Film Awards it won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor for Leslie Cheung and Best Cinematography. It now regularly tops Hong Kong critics' lists of the best local films and sits third on the Hong Kong Film Awards Association's 2005 list of the greatest Chinese films. Who it is for: viewers who prefer atmosphere to plot. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a story to follow. The film is deliberately scattered and most of its characters vanish without arriving anywhere.