PHILIPPA HAWKER, Forever Cheung, from 2003,
Leslie Cheung, who took his own life in April this year, was one of cinema's most compelling actors - a quick, elusive, gorgeous talent, never less than boyishly handsome and often heartbreakingly beautiful. He worked with some of Hong Kong's finest directors; in a range of roles and across a variety of genres he was: dandy, ghost, lover, cad, killer, manipulator, thief, younger brother, naïf.
He had a star quality that seemed to come from another era. He is compared to the likes of James Dean and Montgomery Clift - performers who simultaneously disrupted and recreated the notion of what it was to be an actor, and who brought a different kind of masculine identity to the screen.
Born Cheung Kwok-wing in 1956, he chose his English name, he said, not only because he was a fan of Gone With the Wind, and of Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes, but also because he liked its androgyny. He tested the representation of desire and sexual ambiguity in a number of roles. Over his career, Leslie - as he was always known to Hong Kong audiences - explored iconic beauty, its representation and its ramifications. His roles and his performances played, memorably and in complex ways, with masculinity, gender and sexuality. Sometimes he had a melting, passive quality, sometimes a feral grace. In a tuxedo (for example, in the cross-dressing comedy He's a Woman, She's a Man, from 1994), he was the picture of matinee idol elegance. In the rich, highly charged The Bride with White Hair (1993), our first glimpse of him is a close-up of his mouth: sensual, distinctive, immediately recognisable. He could use his beauty creatively, and work against it. He could play innocence persuasively, he had a nice line in bumbling naiveté, and was adept at physical comedy.
Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild (1991), the film from which this program takes its name, is a quintessential Leslie role. He plays Yuddi, a young man with an apparently boundless confidence in his power to compel; yet Yuddi's effortless beauty, his manipulative assurance, are tempered by something more complex and difficult in his character. Leslie creates a sense of Yuddi's damaged glamour: his self-centredness but also his self-destructiveness, and, most of all, his vulnerability, pain, and the particular lack that leads him into a damaging search for completion.
With brief interruptions, Leslie continued to maintain, as many Hong Kong actors do, a successful singing career - successful enough for him to become something of an entertainment institution, one of the singers known as the Four Heavenly Kings of Pop. His stage shows became increasingly elaborate explorations of image: he played with costume, performance, style. In recent tours, he presented an androgynous, gender-bending series of stage personas, switching from singlet and blue jeans, to a dress, to a tuxedo with wings, shifting from slicked-back hair to a waist-length wig. That he was gay had been an open secret: it was on stage that he came out, dedicating a song to the man who was his long-time partner.
Narcissism was a theme for him, undoubtedly. In Yang ± Yin, Stanley Kwan's intriguing documentary study of Hong Kong cinema made for the BFI's Century of Cinema project, Leslie talks confidently and playfully about this, and about his performance of gender. There's a danger, however, in over-emphasising the connection with Narcissus, the mythological figure who gazed forever at his own reflection, while others, such as the nymph Echo, languished for unrequited love of him. It risks suggesting vanity, or self-regard, rather than creative self-consciousness, and it tends to play down the element of self-awareness in his performance.
Fellow actors and filmmakers consistently recall his dedication. Patrick Tam, who directed him as a delicately beautiful rich kid in Nomad (1982) said that he '...never fixated on his persona. His self-confidence sprang from his firm grip and thorough comprehension of the characters he played.'
Maggie Cheung, in a tribute published in Cahiers du Cinema after Leslie's death, recalled working with him in a scene that was shot, last thing at night, on Days of Being Wild. It was a scene in which she had to return some things to the apartment of the man who had broken her heart, Yuddi (played by Leslie). The camera was on Maggie: all you could see of him was his back. It had been a gruelling stretch of filming, and everyone was exhausted. As the shot was being set up, Maggie says, she noticed Leslie carefully rehearsing, even at this late stage of the day, trying to get something just right: the sound that his footsteps made. That degree of commitment to the project and the character, she said, made a deep impression on her. It is a story that seems to embody all the complexities of Leslie Cheung, ever conscious of the demands of performance and the significance of the telling detail: the image of Narcissus, out of sight of the camera, painstakingly rehearsing an echo.
Philippa Hawker, Film Critic The Age and co-curator, Days of Being Wild: The Screen Life of Leslie Cheung.
Days of Being Wild: The Screen Life of Leslie Cheung screens at ACMI from Thursday 30 October to Sunday 9 November 2003.