Vivid and blurry, like all Wong Kar-wai films. I'm not sure I've ever seen Leslie Cheung in anything before - at any rate, not in anything in which I've taken notice of him (saving Ashes of Time) - but he's great in this, sulky, drowsy, languidly dangerous, little-boy attractive; Maggie Cheung, younger, I think, than I've ever seen her before, is soft-edged and vulnerable; and the others caught, directly or elliptically, in his orbit are almost as memorable. For me, the pleasures of Days of Being Wild aren't as immediate as those of some of his others, but it's still magnificent and would certainly repay watching.
Also, a propos not of this one in particular, but certainly of its director, here's a nice poem in the latest Believer - kind of a hipster poem (I mean, come on, "I run into Damon and Naomi in the street"?), right down to the multiplying layers of self-consciousness about what it's doing and saying (ie, aimin' to have its cake and eat it with the towers of hipster culture it constructs), but still, very nice for all that, and I think successful in what it aims for.
* * *
"Galactic" by Joshua Clover
And the neighbors are playing a recorded muezzin into the courtyard
And the people upstairs are having a party and laughing out the window
And the women are arriving in sparkly silver shoes
And the style I am told yesterday in London is called Galactic
And it was over last month says Bigna tan and beautiful with Romansch accent
And I am feeling very global about all of this we talk Borges translations
And catch up on the very latest fashions and is that not paradise?
And home again the next day I run into Damon and Naomi in the street
Stopping over en route to a wedding in Morocco it doesn't even feel coincidental
And we discuss Japanese noise bands and later I go to the leftist bar with wifi
Near the bookstore and the blue clouds and is that not paradise?
And thinking is a feeling too but one that cannot come to rest in another
And I am in love with everybody which is miserable and lasts
Five minutes amidst this great muchness of things I go down
To the noodle shop to act out scenes from a Wong Kar Wai movie
In my head about which the sweet-faced counterman probably has no idea
Though he gives me some knowing looks and we are waiting together
In the noodle steam and in the tamarind and lemongrass steam
For an international letter with a key folded inside or for love to return
And in walks a sexy boy with scarred lip and We Are The Power T-shirt
And he is tremendously real just as abstract ideas are real and the absence
Of beloveds is real and the incomparable Faye Wong having of late
Moved to Beijing from the real world of the movies is still exactly as real
As the steam in the noodle shop is real and how is this not paradise?
If love is for the one if love is a redoubt against the many it is useless to me
It is some holiday and my friends are scattered like confetti on the earth.
* * *
One of the things I like about the poem, see, is the way that it captures something of the cinematic/real nature of so much 'modern' experience ('post-modern', natch) - and the way that it double-codes 'scenes from a Wong Kar Wai movie', because, you know, when one watches a scene from a Wong Kar-wai movie, it is indeed 'a scene from a Wong Kar-wai' movie, but it's also real - you know, real...
