A fei zheng chuan (Days of Being Wild)

Everyday fragments from the history of impossible loves, repetitive as in Hou Hsiao-hsien, hallucinatory and hermetic as in Terence Davies. The obsessive leitmotif: loneliness. A gentle film about failure, cinema that watches itself die. Seven fates, sublimely interwoven, interlaced, intertwined. Days of Being Wild dreams up the year 1960 in Hong Kong. The film holds its breath to sense how long a moment can last. For example: the moment ‘one minute to three’. An obsession that is also that of the protagonist: he searches for his origins, as if he could find the meaning of his death-wish existence in them or in the seconds before three o'clock. The other characters also repeatedly return to the past or are haunted by it. Their longings are for other places: Manila, Macao, America. Time and space dissolve into uncertainty, and death awaits at the end of the film. (Harry Tomicek)

Photo: Austrian Film Museum