BEFORE you scream and before you even doubt this discovery, hold your tongue.
Wong Kar-wai, the great director behind such gloriously decadent cinemas as In the Mood for Love, Happy Together and My Blueberry Nights (an unheralded English-language film, with Norah Jones incandescent it) did not really go to Bikol. I mean, there is no proof, no ticket to show and no documentation at all about this trip. Let me, however, backtrack. And this will be long drive back home, back to where I fancied this idea.
A search for more versions of one of my favorite old songs—“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”—brought me face-to-face with the so-called founder of Cantopop, the late and much lamented Leslie Cheung. There was nothing exemplary about his version, although it was a lovely version, a bit effete but very dark. Instead of molding his voice according to the great male balladeers who popularized the song, Leslie Cheung seemed to be channeling another vocal immortal, Connee Boswell. The version was elegantly depressed and that was a challenge enough. It was the video itself, which accompanied the music: a film noir that, despite being snippets of scenes from another film universe, made sense. There was a high, a natural low, a rhythm in the whole movement of characters.
I became aware of the presence of this actor once more, this Leslie Cheung, boyish but reeking of multiple demons and angels all competing for his attention. I looked and found one of his old films, a watershed in Hong Kong cinema: Days of Being Wild. Directed by Wong Kar-wai, the film is the first engagement of the Chinese auteur with Christopher Doyle, the great cinematographer.
When people talk of Wong Kar-wai, they invariably mention his In the Mood for Love, perhaps the moodiest of all Chinese films, described by J. Hoberman of The Village Voice as “both giving and withholding.” One feels the same way about Leslie Cheung both in his role and in his character in Days of Being Wild. If one was not one of those women who pined for his attention and body, men would wish to be with Cheung. And yet this man appeared to be always on the run.
In other words, there are many similarities in terms of mood and contour between In the Mood for Love and Days of Being Wild. And yet, very few cineastes ever talked about the latter. Was In the Mood for Love more engaging?
I know: you are anticipating my conjecture about Days of Being Wild and its Bikol connection….
Days of Being Wild opens with the camera trained on the back of a man approaching a store, where a young girl stands. The man is Leslie Cheung; the woman is Maggie Cheung. The man asks the woman what her name is. The girl refuses. The man says he knows her anyway. The woman asks how and where he got her name. The man tells the woman to remember that minute where he first gets to know her because that is one important minute for the two of them. The woman falls for the man. They make love. The woman wants to move in and asks the man to marry her. The man says he is not the marrying kind. The woman leaves but comes back. The man, it seems, is not interested whether she leaves or goes. That minute is all that matters.
Another woman becomes the man’s lover. This other woman persists and insists she stays. The man, however, dictates the rules of the relationship. Come to think of it, there are no rules for this man, and that is why the woman—and other women—will find it difficult to live with him.
The man lives with an older woman who took care of him from infancy. The man asks only one thing from the woman: who his mother is. The woman never gives him the information because if he finds out, the woman says, he is going to leave her.
I recite the litanies of events just to summarize the actions happening onscreen and make sense of them. But making sense of Days of Being Wild is trying to find logic in intuitions. Wong Kar-wai’s characters imply, dissipate, cohere for a while and insinuate into each other’s lives.
Yuddy, the name of this man portrayed by Leslie Cheung, finally finds out the whereabouts of his mother. She is in the Philippines. She belongs to an aristocratic family. Yuddy leaves Hong Kong and travels to the island in an attempt to find his mother. He arrives in the Philippines and this is where the shock of recognition begins. He goes to the Chinatown. He meets the policeman who befriended his first girlfriend. He tries to visit the palatial home of his mother who does not see him. When he leaves the mansion, he says, he “feels someone is watching him.” Indeed, someone is watching him. It is his mother. It is our very own Tita Muñoz appearing in an eternity of minutes. Then, as Yuddy walks out from the failed encounter, he is shown in a fast gait, the lonesome Latin beat of Xavier Cugat caresses the cowpath flanked by tall coconut trees, he slows down, the technology of slow-motion taking the place of lost causes.
Not everything is lost. Yuddy and the policeman-turned-seaman go on an adventure. They fight the bad men over a bad business negotiation, and escape the problem coming from nowhere by riding a train. In the train, they are pursued by the villains. Yuddy asks how far the destination is. Some 12 hours, the conductor explains. Did you say 12 hours? Train in 1960? Remember, the tall palm trees, the seeming forest and more greenness on the ancient hills. The train is going to Bikol!
You don’t believe me? I don’t really care. What I care is this film with actors creating the loveliest of anguish and the most opulent of sorrows and remorse: Maggie Cheung, extravagantly articulate in silence and timidity; Andy Lau, ambivalent in his search for his own self, a manliness deceived into his own imagined force; Rebecca Pan, the former prostitute who nurtures the motherless child in Yuddy but is now searching for her own home even as she maintains the home for lost men; and Clarita Lau, whose contribution to this tale of agitated hearts is her endless pining for the man who left her long before she heard the goodbyes. At the center of this tale are more tales, each one lobbying for a narrator, each narrator losing hold of the plot, each plot missing a song.
Here is the film that ushered in In the Mood for Love, and here is the film that made many of us forget about kung fu and the incursion of the Chinese into our territorial waters.