In Days of Being Wild, the ever-recurring themes of a Wong Kar Wai movie are already present. It's a film about obsessive love, obsessions that spread like a disease, love that doesn't leave its prey in peace but feeds on the heart. Usually, Wong Kar Wai is quite successful in exporing this dark side of "love", but here, it seems to me that only a handful of scenes evoke the appropriate quiet & implicit maelstrom of emotion. Most of the scene baths in a mysterious darkness. Most scenes are composed so that an eerie light is situated somewhere on the edge of the frame. In one scene, we see a girl talking to a police officer doing the night shift. They wander through dark alleys and talk about what goes on in their lives. This is a very good scene. It work just the way it should. I wouldn't consider it an insult to say that Wong Kar Wai makes mood films. It's just that in this film, he doesn't really have the skill to strike the right note. Too many scenes appear unfocused and the conversations seem idle and unncessary. In the best Wong Kar Wai films, every word functions as a dagger. Here, those moments are few.
(One interesting aspect of the film is how it is one of the male characters that is eroticized to an extent that is very unusual in mainstream films, where it is usually female characters that are treated in this way.)
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