Sustento fundamental para realizar un sociodrama

Hui maintains Hueyin as the major storyteller, and most of the flashbacks are shot from Hueyin’s viewpoint to see how she re-understands the past and its relation to the present. On top of that, however, Hueyin is also given a meta-perspective besides the vantage points of hers and Aiko’s in their respective flashback sequences. This is shown by Hueyin’s voice-over in the opening, telling us that she was twenty-five years old when this story began. This voice-over sets the stage for the ensuing scenes to unreel while assuring us that the whole film is actually her recollection.

If we imagine that every flashback sequence is a journey through which the protagonists would change their perspectives to look at ways that would help resolve their entrenched problems, the addition of Hueyin’s meta-perspective may ironically block her view in conceiving every

communication breakdown with her parents-in-law and we are introduced to this theme from middle-aged Aiko’s viewpoint to try and understand why. However, the whole incident is also re-considered from adult Hueyin’s meta-perspective, indicating that her subjectivity ultimately presides. This allows her to understand thoroughly her past and her mother’s past in relation to her present in the 1970s, as well as her more recent present as indicated by her meta-voice-over. We understand from Derrida’s concept of ‘play’ that there will be constant substitutions and supplementations between the ‘centre’ and the ‘sign’, which would open up infinitely the ‘field’ for discourse. According to Derrida,

In the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse. […] The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.41

In this sense, Hueyin’s subjectivity, which becomes the new frame of reference in this film to replace her dubious ‘home’ and ‘homeland’, turns into the ‘transcendental signified’ to fix the perceptions of what she re-learns. This would lead her to the dilemma of getting stuck and not seeing other opportunities to continue re-interpreting herself and her family’s situations. The director’s purpose of using flashback journeys for channelling emotions and eliminating misunderstandings in this film would be counteracted.

Hence, while I have gone away from Abbas’ spatial concern and Chow’s temporal concern with the narrative structure of this film and agreed with Naficy’s opinion on the use of flashbacks to add in new viewpoints in this film, my study of them as informed by Derrida’s ideas leads me to be cautious in measuring effects of these flashbacks and the way in which Hui presents them. Conversely, in Days of Being Wild, Wong does not opt for a meta-perspective in using voice- overs for narration purposes. I will discuss below how his protagonists in this film accomplish

uninterrupted self-orientation through circuitous and episodic narrative, together with stylized camerawork among other visual features.

3.2. Days of Being Wild: Journeying of the Unconcerned Rebels

Days of Being Wild was released in 1990 as Wong’s second feature, funded by the same Hong Kong production company In-Gear as that of the director’s début As Tears Go By.42 It was scripted by Wong and planned originally as the first part of a dyad set in 1960 and 1966 respectively, though the 1966 segment was later aborted.43 Shot on location in Hong Kong and the Philippines, this film was reputed as the most expensive Hong Kong film ever made because of its costly superstar cast, but the film did not bring home satisfactory box-office income.44 Nevertheless, with the breakthrough including using non-linear, circuitous narrative structure and departure from generic formula among other features, the film earned Wong the Best Director Award at the 10th Hong Kong Films Awards (Hong Kong equivalent for the Oscar Awards) in 1991.45 At the 24th Hong Kong Films Awards in 2005, it came third among 100 best Chinese films made during the first century of Chinese cinemas.

As a non-genre film, Days of Being Wild tells the story of six young adults in the Hong Kong of 1960. The protagonists are not as anti-social and rebellious as the film’s Chinese title A Fei Zhengzhuan (literally, the story of rebels) suggests, but they are all too self-centred for a bygone era that the director remembers as pleasing in every respect.46 Yuddy (Leslie CHEUNG) is a handsome but unemployed womanizer brought up by his foster mother Rebecca (Rebecca PAN) who used to work as a dancehall courtesan. Yuddy’s biological mother comes from a rich family in the Philippines and has been supporting their well-off lives since he was abandoned as a baby. After pestering Rebecca for years about the information of his biological parents whom he has

never met, Yuddy finally gets the answer from Rebecca when she decides to emigrate to the USA. Yuddy then journeys to the Philippines to visit his biological mother but she refuses to see him.

Meanwhile, Yuddy has broken up successively with two women in Hong Kong for fear of commitment. The first woman is Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), a shy tuck shop worker. The second is Mimi (aka Lulu) (Carina LAU), a possessive dancehall courtesan. Yuddy’s unemployed buddy Zeb (Jacky CHEUNG) secretly falls for Mimi but his love is unrequited. On the other hand, policeman Tide (Andy LAU) is attracted to Lizhen, though he later chooses to leave Hong Kong to work as a sailor. Shortly after Tide bumps into Yuddy in the Philippine Chinatown, Yuddy is shot dead by Philippine gangsters in an illegal passport deal. Like Yuddy’s reincarnation, an unidentified man (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is featured in a two-and-half-minute-long non- dialogued take in the finale when he is grooming himself meticulously in his small, dimly-lit room before going out.

Similar to Song of the Exile, Days of Being Wild is among the corpus of Hong Kong films that are imbued with a dismal mood, either explicitly or implicitly, referring to the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 and the imminent 1997 Handover.47 Moreover, Marchetti notes that the filmmakers ‘look at their current situation with regard to the People’s Republic through the prism of a previous era’48 in the 1960s. Wong hints at this idea when he discusses re-creating the 1960 ambience entirely from his own memory, believing that memory is about a ‘sense of loss’.49 Enchanted by the atmosphere of the 1960s, Wong states elsewhere that memory and time always indicates a ‘loss of innocence’.50 Wong’s preoccupation with the topic of ‘time’ thus leads Tony Rayns to regard the director as the ‘poet of time’.51 In their article ‘Trapped in the Present: Time in the Films of Wong Kar-Wai’, Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli refer to Wong as the

‘psychologist of time’.52 Monographing on Wong’s oeuvre, Teo comments that Days of Being Wild associates more with the time period and the social factors than with the genre.53 Underneath this argument is an affirmation of Wong’s propensity to embrace the 1960s sentiments with his 1990s point of view.

We may notice that the director channels his intent through the characterization of his protagonists. Similar to Hong Kongers living in the 1990s and perplexed by the impending Handover, everyone in this film is discontented with their current situations in 1960.54 Most of them desire to leave Hong Kong for somewhere else to start their lives all over again, for example, Yuddy goes to the Philippines. He is followed by Mimi. Rebecca goes to the USA while Tide leaves Hong Kong for his sailing job. Wong nonetheless does not show us their actual journeys. Instead, he deploys a circuitous and episodic narrative structure and stylized camerawork among other features that, I would argue, attain a sense of journeying within the film, and allow us to witness how his protagonists vividly develop their thinking independently during a time when they feel puzzled. I will investigate his approach in the following sub- sections.