Famous Unknown - Arizona Daily Star

[mu99le]

thanks tonygrrl

Famous unknown
This Hong Kong superstar is virtually invisible in the United States, but his role in the futuristic fantasy '2046' might change that
By Edward Guthmann
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

In Hong Kong, where he's the veteran of 65 movies, Tony Leung Chiu Wai can't go anywhere without asking for trouble. Paparazzi stalk him at home and trail him in cars. Whenever he dines out, restaurant personnel report his whereabouts to tabloids and collect hefty kickbacks.

"You are under surveillance all the time, 24 hours," Leung says. "And you don't know when they are going to appear." It's that way throughout Asia: Even China, once loath to follow Western cultural models, has a thriving industry of celebrity rags and gossip pages.

In the United States, Leung, 43, is unknown outside an ever-diminishing community of foreign-film enthusiasts. If you're lucky, you saw him play an undercover cop in "Infernal Affairs" and John Woo's "Hard Boiled," a master assassin in Yimou Zhang's "Hero," or a series of soulful, disaffected dreamers in films from frequent collaborator Wong Kar Wai.

Their latest collaboration, "2046," which opens in Tucson theaters today, is a futuristic fantasy about the impossibility of romantic love. The film casts Leung as Mr. Chow, the character he played in Wong's 2000 success "In the Mood for Love," for which he was named best actor at the Cannes Film Festival. In that film, set in Hong Kong in 1962, Mr. Chow is a married man who falls for an elegant married woman, played by Maggie Cheung, who lives in the same rooming house. The couple rendezvous in taxis, take chaste walks down back alleys by night and play out an extended dance of exquisite, unconsummated desire.

Not doing it has never been so erotic - at least on film.

In "2046," Mr. Chow is relocated to Shanghai, bitter and alone, addicted to dead-end relationships that satisfy his taste for misery and fuel the pulpy stories he writes. The title refers to the number of the hotel room where Cheung met Leung in "In the Mood for Love," to the year when the former British colony of Hong Kong fully reverts to China and also to the future - to a place and time where lonely people go by train to recapture lost memories. In addition to Cheung, the cast includes Leung's former girlfriend of 12 years, Carina Lau, and Chinese superstars Gong Li ("Raise the Red Lantern") and Zhang Ziyi ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon").

It took five years to complete "2046," partly because of the SARS epidemic and also because of Wong's well-known penchant for delaying his pictures with incessant fine-tuning. When "2046" premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, the print arrived 12 hours late. Two months later, it was pulled from the Edinburgh Film Festival because perfectionist Wong wanted more time to tinker.

There's not a lot that happens in "2046." The languid, carefully composed shots that Wong constructs for his actors are anathema to the frenzied rhythms of contemporary Hollywood. But Leung, who has starred in most of Wong's films - six altogether - is always compelling. Few actors have Leung's gift for generating emotion and sympathy with such economy of means. He never strains, but slips stealthlike inside his characters.

Last year, a French newspaper called Leung "the Asian Clark Gable," presumably because of the thin mustache he sports in "2046" and the retro look of slicked-back hair, thin neckties and suits with narrow lapels. The resemblance ends there. Whereas Gable was robust, athletic and lacking in mystery, Leung has the warm dark eyes and inner calm of a Zen priest.

He's equally adept at playing gangsters, gentlemen, killers and cops, but in person, one is stunned at how short and delicate Leung is. Given the authority of his screen acting, the contrast between his screen self and real self is stunning. Leung is so quiet and soft-spoken, in fact, that he seems utterly defenseless - like a frightened schoolboy forced out of voluntary seclusion.

Leung has made dozens of films apart from Wong, so their collaboration hasn't exactly defined him, and yet their creative symmetry is so strong and their collective achievement so remarkable - beginning with "Days of Being Wild" in 1991 and including the influential "Happy Together" in 1997 and "Chungking Express" in 1994 - that one thinks of them as a unit. Leung once said, "We belong to each other."
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"Soon we must all face the choice between what is right...and what is easy"

[Tony Grrl]

Good review isn't it. Sorry, for not posting it myself but we can always rely on muggle!
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Sheila

TLCW Fan UK

[Gathoni]

Yes, Tony Grrl, I agree, and thanks Mu99le!
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The strengthening of faith comes through staying with it in the hour of trial.