“I've heard that there's a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life... that's when it dies.”
Each person will come out of this film with a different interpretation for this quote, for me the bird symbolises those who are too terrified of feeling anything real, and so spend their whole lives distracting themselves with anything that will disconnect them from the ground, because they know if they ever come back down, the pain will be too great to bare.
In the first two acts of the film, we see the protagonist attempt to drown the grief that comes from not knowing who his parents are with flings with women (that he never allows to become anything real), sex and occasional violence. It’s only when his adoptive mother finally tells him where his birth mother is that he finally allows himself to face that hurt, which ultimately gets him killed. Like his adoptive mother said, all his life he used not knowing his parents as an excuse for “years of running wild” (like the bird that always flies), but the minute he’d know their identity he would no longer have an excuse for his behaviour and, much like the bird, would be forced to finally ground himself, face his complicated feelings and grow up.
Wong’s ability to explore such complicated human emotions through the story of a man and that specific metaphor is wonderful.
No one does atmosphere, nostalgia and longing quite like the Chinese filmmaker and Days of Being Wild is no exception. The beautiful, intriguing and often suffocating mise-en-scène, the delicious score, and the tantalising use of colour and light make this film yet another dreamy escape for hopeless romantics who just want to understand the pain in their hearts a little better, or rather sit with it for an hour and a half.
The ending feels out of place, but the fact that it eventually functioned as a link into his later film In The Mood For Love, makes the unofficial Love Trilogy all the more fun to experience.
