Leslie Cheung, Actor--From Hong Kong to the World-Part 1

Part 1

--You have many different looks.

--What type do you prefer?

--I like them all.  I like them either separately or together.  Which is the real one?

This dialog, between Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui in “Rouge”, is a perfect descrīption of Leslie’s hypnotic appeal as an actor.  He was so many different things in over 40 films.  He was those things separately and sometimes all mixed up together.  We were always left wondering where, inside of these myriad characters, was the seed of the real Leslie Cheung.

His earliest films, dating from the early to mid-80s, banked on his teen idol good-looks.  But in the right role, and with sympathetic direction, we catch sight of a mesmerizing screen presence as early as 1980, in his first serious role in the teen drama “On Trial”.  Leslie was only 23 at the time, didn’t have much experience as an actor and therefore didn’t command a lot of technique.  But what he did have was a cocky confidence in his own abilities and appeal, and the ability to bring an emotional dimension to even a supporting role.  Whenever Leslie is on screen, the camera can’t seem to get enough of him, and, whenever he displays a flash of that inner light, he  seduces the eye and charms even the most jaded film-goer.

For several years, Leslie was typecast in various pictures aimed at a teen audience.  He turned in his most interesting performances playing the ah fei role—the young man rebelling against the social mores and parental expectations of his time. In “On Trial”, Leslie brought a real emotional depth to his role of an adolescent on the brink of manhood, mortified when his friends discover the desperate poverty of his family and his shame at being abandoned by his father while still a child.  In “Nomad”, Leslie embodies an emotionally disconnected young man who lost his mother at a critical time in his life and has drifted aimlessly since.  Watching the scenes where Leslie befriends a distraught young woman and then makes love to her for the first time shows us a sensual Leslie, an actor comfortable expressing the passionate and sexual dimensions of his character.  This was the first glimpse of the great screen lover who thrilled audiences with his frank, and sometimes daring love scenes.  Notable performances in these teen dramas include “Energetic 21”, where Leslie plays a bored, well-to-do young man whose main passion in life is street racing, and “For Your Heart Only”, where he embodies a young master of seduction bedding and discarding lovers with equal amoral abandon.  But it took Wong Kar-Wai’s reframing of the ah fei character to give Leslie one of his defining roles.

Yuddy, in “Days of Being Wild”, is an older and more cynical version of the characters Leslie played in his earlier ah fei roles.  Rather than being a cautionary tale of youth run wild, “Days of Being Wild” is a character study examining the self-loathing, nihilism and self-destructive tendencies of a wealthy but very damaged young man.  Life for Yuddy is about satisfying his animal needs, but, even more, it is a power struggle to extract love at all costs from the women who are under his spell, from his girlfriends to his adoptive mother.  All of these relationships are sexually charged, none more so than that between Yuddy and his stepmother.  All becomes clear when we see her latest young lover. Seen from behind coming out of her bedroom after lovemaking, for a few seconds we are sure we are seeing Yuddy.  In the end, Yuddy’s pent up rage at the world and, even more, at himself, leads to his destruction.  He finds true and honest love and rejects it because it requires commitment.  Instead, he drifts in and out of a relationship with a woman who is as possessive and masochistic as his stepmother, before dying a violent and senseless death in an alien land.

Leslie’s performance is breathtaking, whether he is reveling in the animal pleasures of dancing the cha-cha in his underwear just after the love of his life has walked out the door, or his masterful seduction of the frumpy girl who works at the snack bar.  The way he circles her is like a feline drinking in his victim’s scent, mesmerizing her with his seductive, unabashed carnality, seducing her in the end without ever touching her.  This is Leslie’s explosive sexual charisma as it had never been captured on film before.  The promise of “Nomad” was finally fulfilled nine years later in “Days of Being Wild”.  The combination of animal sensuality coupled with a barely concealed vulnerability makes for a mesmerizing screen presence.  Leslie would bring these two qualities to many roles from this time forward.  “Days of Being Wild” marked a watershed in Leslie’s film career.  Wong Kar-Wai gave Leslie the room to develop his character, drawing on qualities that the director saw in Leslie himself, but transformed and put to the task of fleshing out the character on screen.  Leslie said in a later interview that the character of Yuddy in “Days of Being Wild” was the closest to his true self of any character he had played.  While it is clear that Leslie was playing a role, he brought a lot of himself to it, and this role continues to resonate with audiences undimmed by time.

To Be Continued