SFL, Gentleman Leslie, from "HK - Orient Extrême Cinéma" (France), Issue No. 1, January 1997, pages 14-19 (translated from French)
Gangster, knight, priest, teddy-boy, rock star... Leslie Cheung has put on all dresses, has gone through all ages. Inaccessible, almost infallible, he slides over the roles and the fashions with the ease of a man who knows he is above others. Portrait of a Dorian Gray with no frame of mind.
Since not long he is forty and yet his look was never so delicate as it is today, almost fragile. He's got a teen-age gait but eyes full of maturity, an angelic face but a seductive smile: Leslie Cheung is a star. He is a myth like the ones Hollywood only had created before. Mythes who transcend the movies in which they act and the life they live. The fact that he started his career as a singer, and today he is still one of the male pop stars the audience adores most, is not unrelated to his popularity as an actor. In spite of an ever-growing desire for westernization, Hong Kong has always been able to produce its own dream-machines. Men or women, they have been dominating for a long time the two leading industries of the colony: music and movies.
In 1988, A Chinese Ghost Story by Ching Siu Tung introduced Leslie Cheung (Cheung Kwok Wing in Cantonese) to the western audience. He was still displaying that naive freshness which won so many tender hearts at the beginning of his career as a TV actor. The romantic teen-age look he had been showing for ten years in commercial productions simply meant to maintain his popularity, was perfectly exploited that time. Under the omnipotent producer Tsui Hark's bright influence, Leslie Cheung and his co-star Joey Wong gave their image of charismatic stars to characters coming out of Chinese folk culture. In the role of an innocent young man fallen for a female ghost in an ancient and mysterious China, Leslie found out a new trump card: an airy and unique way of wearing traditional costumes which give to his figure an absolute classicism, a classicism that other directors (especially Stanley Kwan and Chen Kaige) wanted to sublimate later on. Besides, in the movies set in past times the image of the pop star can more easily desappear and give its place to the actor. By sorting to his allure more than to his attitude, he managed to drop the overacting of his first movies and identify himself with characters actually tailored to him. Rouge by Stanley Kwan is a very beautiful proof of this. The movie, shot one year after A Chinese Ghost Story, joined Leslie and Anita Mui, queen of cantopop and brilliant actress, in a strange story of love, death and ghosts. Their first encounter is fascinating because it's based on a game of seduction between two androgynous characters: a woman wearing men's clothes and a man with a figure so slender that reveals his femininity and frailty. In the role of Twelfth Master Chan, Leslie Cheung shows an evanescent gentleness, at the thin boundary between yin and yang, and yet he doesn't upset his sexual identity. He upset it on purpose four years later, when he played one of the essential roles of his career, the role of the Peking Opera singer Cheng Dieyi in Farewell My Concubine by Chen Kaige (1993 Golden Palm in Cannes).
That complex role of a man enslaved by feelings he can express only on stage, when he plays the delicate concubine Yu, was proposed to him five years earlier. It was an offer made by a TV station and he declined it asserting a role of that kind was incompatible with his image. As a matter of fact, in 1987 Leslie was still a music idol who was not very experienced as an actor. In the only important movie he had shot till then, A Better Tomorrow by John Woo (1986), he simply played a supporting role. But in 1992 the challenge of Farewell My Concubine was totally different. He was so successful and so highly esteemed by critics that he could take a deliberate risk and go working in mainland China. With a disconcerting ease he identified himself with the character of an actor whose drama consists in not being able to distinguish between theatre and real life any more: the result is astonishing. The femininity he had sparingly displayed till then, literally burst out in scenes full of exciting sensuality. The one who hides himself under the concubine Yu's purple make-up is not the singer Dieyi, but the actor Leslie Cheung who does violence to his own image. The idolized star desappears so that the actor is free to completely devote himself to his character. He doesn't play a character. He is that character. He is a man abandoned to a devouring passion, a human being who is extremely touching because is deeply tragic. Leslie didn't find any more such a complete freedom in acting, such a perfect rapture in a dazzling mixture of sweetness and violence. Yet, he went on playing upon his own image in much lighter comedies like Dong Cheng Xi Jiu (The Eagle Shooting Heroes by Jeff Lau, 1993), where he performed an exhilarating parody of Peking Opera, or in much bolder comedies like He's A Woman, She's A Man by Peter Chan (1994). In that movie he gave birth to a character based on his real life, a superstar of the local music industry. The screenplay is intelligent and his role is sagaciously delineated: in 1989 he announced his decision to put an end to his career as a singer. Well, in the movie he literally feels like composing and singing again. Moreover, the theme song of the movie (afterwards he recorded it for a new album) got the Hong Kong Film Award in 1995 and Leslie came back to the limelight of music scene with full honours.
He's A Woman, She's A Man straight broaches the theme of homosexuality, though it's a taboo in Hong Kong. In fact, the character played by Leslie, Sam Koo, finds himself entrapped in an overpowering love for a male singer whose career he has just launched, Lam Chi Wing. But the young man is actually a cross-dressed girl (Anita Yuen). So the audience, who is aware of the trick, can see Sam trying to repress his presumed homosexuality and in the end succumbing to his feelings. Just for once, in Hong Kong, the comedy is brilliant. No vulgarity, no whirling nonsenses, but an amusing and - all things considered - romantic story. Leslie goes through the movie with a splendid nonchalance and consolidates his image of perfect star nothing and nobody can dim. The success of the movie brought forth a sequel in 1996 (Who's The Woman, Who's The Man) in which Anita Mui joined the couple Leslie Cheung/Anita Yuen, and the result was a triangle of lovers still ambiguous but much less convincing.
Leslie Cheung's apparent frailty was often utilized by directors who wanted him to act in charming roles. Chen Kaige, for example, tried this year to re-create the magic of Farewell My Concubine in Temptress Moon. Anyway, he was only able to shoot a disembodied image of him, a chimerical character deprived of feelings and sentiments.
Other directors, such as Ronny Yu, faced this problem by neglecting the artistic side and advantaging an icon newly exalted in every new movie. With The Bride With White Hair 1&2 (1993) and especially Phantom Lover (1995) - impressive works, from an aesthetic point of view - the director came to the clear decision to sublimate Leslie's beauty, so Leslie confined himself, with his usual grace, to giving his face to characters lacking in substance. After all, in spite of his own cleverness, Tsui Hark himself brought to Leslie simply box-office success, especially with his comedies (The Banquet, The Chinese Feast, Tri-Star), and exploited the idol's popularity, sometimes even to the detriment of the actor's talent. But luckily one of Leslie's peculiarities consists in being able to never become ridiculous, no matter if they make him dance with a gigantic fish while wearing a hair-grip (The Chinese Feast) or if they turn him into a Catholic priest camouflaged under clothes borrowed from a fan of Elvis (Tri-Star).
By alternating dramas and comedies, epic movies and thrillers, little by little Leslie Cheung has become one of the most important personalities of Hong Kong cinema of the last ten years. The "sunshine boy" of the '80s, the pop star idolized by hysteric girls, has given his place to a talented actor capable of avoiding the traps of an industry in which it's so easy to get lost. It was especially thanks to his encounter with Wong Kar Wai that he became aware of his formidable potential. At that time the director had already to his credit the excellent As Tears Go By (1988). Everybody knows he likes to utilize Hong Kong stars in an unusual way. Leslie is not an exception to the rule and the result is surprising: Days Of Being Wild (1990) reveals for the first time an actor who wonderfully displays his manliness. With his cigarette and his brilliantined hair, Leslie is Yuddi, a violent and sensual wild boy who ruins himself and his girlfriends' life in a '60s Hong Kong intentionally represented as a phantom city.
Being aware of his leading actor's narcissistic attitude, Wong Kar Wai filmed him like no other director did before and let him move in front of the camera in his own way. He shot some unforgettable scenes, like the one when Leslie, while looking at himself in the mirror, begins a piercing dance on a melody by Xavier Cugat and wiggles his hips in a provocative way. Though the movie was a flop at the box-office (for other reasons, the same happened to Ashes Of Time in 1994), nowadays it's considered a cult-movie. Thanks to Days Of Being Wild, Leslie finally proved himself to be able to play both a hero with a brutal masculinity and a character with a delicate charm: his performance brought him the Hong Kong Award for best actor. Strange to say, such a display of pure virility emerged again only this year in Shanghai Grand by Poon Man Kit, where Leslie looks more brilliant than ever. As if he needed to desacralize his own image once again and make a good use of a new character.
Though today Leslie is almost the absolute king of Hong Kong cinema, too often he can't find roles as extraordinary as his talent. Let's hope the movie he has just finished shooting - another movie directed by Wong Kar Wai (Happy Together) - gives him the chance to explore in a new way his complex personality. Because it's difficult that another star can shine with so many different lights in Chinese firmament.
Translation by Leslietango.