2046's Tony Leung Chiu Wai an expressive and versatile actor

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2046's Tony Leung Chiu Wai an expressive and versatile actor

By Karen Durbin
The New York Times
Posted September 7 2005

In Wong Kar-wai's sublimely funny Chungking Express, Tony Leung Chiu Wai plays Cop 633, the world's most lovable policeman. When his flight attendant girlfriend dumps him -- what was she thinking? -- he cheers himself up by commiserating with his weeping dish towel (it drips) and lecturing his shrunken bar of soap on the importance of maintaining appearances no matter how miserable you are. He even has a brisk chat with a couple of large stuffed animals left behind by the merciless dame.

None of this is cloying or twee, because even as Leung mocks his sadness, he lets us feel it, too, lurking like a low-grade fever just behind the jokes. With 65 movies under his belt, the 43-year-old Leung is not only one of the biggest movie stars in Asia, he's also one of the most expressive and versatile actors anywhere.

Leung starred in two high-profile imports that opened in the United States last year, the undercover cop thriller Infernal Affairs and Zhang Yimou's martial-arts costume epic Hero. But he made his strongest impression on American art-house audiences -- and won the best actor award at Cannes -- as the lovelorn journalist Chow Mo-wan in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000). An emotionally scarred Chow returned to screens here on Friday in 2046, Wong's lavish sequel.

Ziyi Zhang (the exquisite ingenue in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) co-stars in 2046 as a trying-to-be-tough young call girl who makes the mistake of falling in love with Chow. A lot of their scenes together are spent either squabbling or having memorably wild sex, but Zhang, who was in her teens when Leung became a star, spoke of him with reverence. "I feel blessed to have worked with Tony," she said in an e-mail message. "He helped raise the level of my acting, and off set, he's quiet and very sweet to everyone."

Leung makes as many movies as he does, including formulaic action pictures and disposable comedies with names like Tom, Dick and Hairy (1993), because, he said, he loves acting so much that he can never get enough of it. He spoke frankly about where that love comes from. When Leung was just turning 7, his father left their house in Hong Kong one day and vanished without a trace. This was deeply humiliating for his mother, who got a job to support Leung and his little sister.

"But we never spoke about it," Leung said. "Not to each other or anyone else. You don't know what happened, just one day your pop disappears. And from that day on I try not to communicate with anyone. I'm so afraid to talk to my classmates, afraid that if someone says something about family I won't know what to do. So I became very isolated. So that's why I love acting, because I can express all my feelings the way I couldn't for so long."

Although he has been a muse for Wong, appearing in all but two of the brilliantly off-beat director's eight features, he also has worked with many other fine Asian directors, in movies like Anh Hung Tran's Cyclo (1995) and Hou Hsaio-hsien's City of Sadness (1989) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998).

Later this year, he expects to be tracking a serial killer for the directors who made the Infernal Affairs series, in which Leung managed to imbue his battle-weary undercover cop with considerable pathos and a rough, seen-it-all sexiness reminiscent of Clark Gable. He's looking forward to that project, but he really lights up at what will follow it -- a seventh movie with Wong for which, he says delightedly, he has to study kung fu.