Days of Being Wild 阿飛正傳 (1990): The Movie Where the Prettiest Boy in Hong Kong Believed He Was a Bird With No Feet
First, take a look at the official trailer.
The Film That Turned a Heartbreaker Into a Legend
In 1990, a young Hong Kong director named Wong Kar-wai made a movie about a man who refuses to love anyone — and accidentally produced one of the most beautiful films ever made in the Cantonese language. The man, Yuddy, is vain, cruel, and irresistible. He tells his girlfriends a story about a bird with no feet that can only land once, to die. Then he walks out on them. Audiences at the time mostly stayed home. Three decades later, the film sits at number three on the Hong Kong Film Awards' list of the 100 greatest Chinese-language films ever made.
What Is It About?
Set in the sweltering Hong Kong of 1960, Days of Being Wild follows Yuddy (Leslie Cheung), a Shanghai immigrant raised by a foster mother he has never stopped resenting. Convinced he is unlovable because he was abandoned, he loves no one — and breaks the hearts of everyone who loves him. He drifts through two women: Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a shy ticket seller at the South China Athletic Association, and Leung Fung-ying (Carina Lau), a brash cabaret dancer everyone calls Mimi.
When Yuddy learns his real mother is a Filipino-Spanish aristocrat who abandoned him, he flies to the Philippines to find her — and is refused. Meanwhile, a lonely policeman named Tide (Andy Lau), who has been quietly in love with Su Li-zhen, quits the force and takes a job on a ship. The film ends not with resolution but with a famous wordless three-minute scene: a stranger (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) lights a cigarette in a tiny room, checks his watch, and waits. It is the seed of a sequel Wong Kar-wai would only make a decade later — and that sequel became In the Mood for Love.
The Team Behind It
This is the film where Wong Kar-wai's obsessions first fully crystallized: fractured timelines, neon and cigarette smoke, pop standards looping like memory, and characters who talk past each other in the humid dark.
- Director / writer: Wong Kar-wai, coming off his debut As Tears Go By (1988).
- Lead: Leslie Cheung — pop superstar and actor — in the role that won him his only Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor.
- The women: Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau, both already stars, both given some of their most quietly devastating early work.
- Supporting: Andy Lau and Jacky Cheung, two of the biggest names in Cantopop, plus a blink-and-miss cameo from Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
- Behind the camera: cinematographer Christopher Doyle (his first of many collaborations with Wong) and production designer and editor William Chang, who shaped the film's look.
- The music: Nat King Cole's "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" haunts the soundtrack — a Western standard Wong turned into pure Hong Kong melancholy.
The Set Pieces and the Numbers
- Release: Hong Kong, 15 December 1990; runtime 94 minutes.
- Box office: a modest HK$9.75 million at the local box office — widely seen as a disappointment on release.
- The turnaround: at the 10th Hong Kong Film Awards (1991) it swept five major prizes — Best Film, Best Director (Wong Kar-wai), Best Actor (Leslie Cheung), Best Cinematography (Christopher Doyle), and Best Art Direction (William Chang).
- Reputation: in 2005 the Hong Kong Film Awards voted it the third greatest Chinese-language film of all time.
- Critical standing today: IMDb 7.4; Rotten Tomatoes 91%; Metacritic 93.
- The bird: Yuddy's "bird with no feet" monologue is among the most quoted passages in Hong Kong cinema.
- The sequel that wasn't: Tony Leung's final-scene character, Chow Mo-wan, became the soul of In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) — meaning this "standalone" film is secretly the root of Wong's most beloved love story.
Why It Matters
Days of Being Wild matters because it broke the grammar of Hong Kong cinema. Before Wong, local films ran on plot and pace. This one ran on mood, music, and the spaces between people. It proved a story could be about almost nothing happening and still feel like everything — that a man standing in a doorway, or a woman waiting by a phone that never rings, could carry more weight than any action scene.
It also redefined what a Hong Kong leading man could be. Leslie Cheung's Yuddy is beautiful and rotten, tender and selfish — a far cry from the righteous heroes of the era. That contradiction is exactly why the character, and the film, refused to die. For Western viewers, it is the cleanest doorway into Wong Kar-wai: less demanding than 2046, more pure than In the Mood for Love, and shot through with a romance for a Hong Kong that was about to vanish.
Final Thought
If you have never seen a Wong Kar-wai film, start here — not because it is his most famous, but because it is where his whole world begins. Watch it on a hot night, with the lights low, and let Nat King Cole's "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" do what it was always meant to do. Then tell me: is Yuddy a villain, or just a boy who believed a sad story about himself?
Which Wong Kar-wai film should I write about next — In the Mood for Love (2000) or 2046 (2004)? Drop your pick below.
Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬
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