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Tony profile from The Age (Australia)

 
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Hong



Joined: 04 Jan 2008
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 30, 2008 6:56 pm    Post subject: Tony profile from The Age (Australia)

From The Age (Australia)

Forever in the mood for Leung

The power of Tony Leung's gaze says it all, writes Philippa Hawker.

ON SCREEN, no one's mastered the art of losing better than Tony Leung. Renunciation, disappointment, rejection, betrayal: he has experienced them all. If you concentrate on some of his best-known roles — in In the Mood for Love, Happy Together, Infernal Affairs, Hero — he can look like the patron saint of unrequited love, the epitome of repressed emotion.

He is the most eloquently undemonstrative of performers. The power of restraint was something the jury recognised at Cannes, when he won the 2000 best actor award for In the Mood For Love, a movie that is all about unacknowledged, unspoken, unacted-upon desire. But he's far more than a virtuoso of melancholy and repression. In a lightweight, funny spy spoof titled Tokyo Raiders, Leung is a deadpan master of get-out-of-a-jam gadgets and hasty aerial getaways: he has also starred in knockabout comedies, period dramas, martial arts spectacles and thrillers.

Now 45, he was a crucial part of Hong Kong cinema's Golden Age in the late '80s and early '90s, and he has made movies outside Hong Kong with art house masters such as Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien and Vietnam's Tran Anh-hung. He has been offered Hollywood roles but they've never been, he says, the right script or the right film.

And in the new Ang Lee feature, Lust, Caution, a tale of espionage and intrigue set in World War II Shanghai, he has added another string to his bow: in a sexually explicit movie, he's a romantic figure with a sadistic edge.

He carries his beauty, his romantic good looks, with diffidence, with a kind of carelessness. But whatever roles directors cast him in, whatever kinds of films they make, they are drawn inevitably to the Leung gaze, and its power to compel the camera.

In 1992's Hard Boiled, one of John Woo's most exhilarating, over-the-top action movies, Woo frequently returns, amid feverish, explosive mayhem, to the contemplation of Leung's face. He plays a sharp, cool underworld figure, a well-dressed man who drives a red convertible and lives on a yacht. He's a cold-blooded killer, a man without attachments. He's an enigma: can he really be who he seems?

On several occasions, Woo positions Leung in the foreground with his back to other characters, and brings the camera in tight on the actor's face. The audience has a privileged view of what the figures behind Leung cannot see: the play of his expressions. Even so, what we witness is little more than a flicker: he's still a man wrestling to keep his emotions hidden. Ten years later, Leung played a similar kind of role in Infernal Affairs (2002), the huge Hong Kong hit on which Scorsese's The Departed is based.

It's a cat-and-mouse story of concealment and deception, with Leung as an undercover cop who infiltrated the triads 10 years earlier and Andy Lau as a police officer who was a triad plant from the start.

This time, there's nothing debonair about Leung's character: he's defined by weariness, by a sense of resigned anguish. On this occasion, we feel what his character has lost by his immersion in his undercover role.

Even at his most charming and light-hearted, there's almost always the shadow of introspection in Leung's characters. It's evident in Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai's lovely, rich, multi-layered movie about brief encounters and missed opportunities, Leung plays a police officer who has broken up with his girlfriend. He's in a state of cautious detachment, unsure of how he should be responding to the aggressive yet oblique interest another young woman is showing him. He prefers, in the meantime, to communicate with inanimate objects: he talks to his dishcloth, he counsels a cake of soap. For many other actors, this would be a parade of whimsy — but Leung gives these scenes a quick, rueful, playful poignancy.

When Leung talks in interviews about acting, he often refers to his childhood, to the fact that his parents argued frequently and that his father left the family when Leung was six. His response, he has said, was to shut down his emotions. When he discovered acting, he was able to express himself through the characters he played. Yet it's clear he's not a Method actor: he locates his characters through physical detail, concrete, tangible elements and inhabits them with great intensity.

There's an intriguing Leung scene — his only appearance in the film — in Wong Kar-wai's haunting evocation of the '60s, Days of Being Wild (1991) that encapsulates this. It's a fleeting, wordless memorable appearance right at the end of the movie. His character appears unheralded, unnamed. He's a dapper man, confined to a cramped room, preparing to go out and assembling what he needs. So many items: cigarettes, jacket, money, cards, a handkerchief carefully folded, a look in the mirror and a gesture of preening and self-presentation. The scene also suggests, in an oblique way, the nature of performance. It is, among other things, a demonstration of the assembling of a character, of preparing a persona to meet the personas that you meet.

It's an odd anticipation, too, of something Wong said later, talking about Leung and one of his most frequent co-stars, Maggie Cheung. He was speaking about their different approaches to acting. Cheung wants to know her motivation, he says. Leung wants to know what his character has in his pockets. Cheung works from inside to out, Leung is the reverse.

There's something about Leung's approach to roles that carries over from one film to another. It's as if, in his screen career, he is exploring different aspects of the self, or aspects that different characters can have in common.

That mysterious unnamed figure from Days of Being Wild was supposed to be more than an enigmatic coda. Wong shot at least two more weeks of material in gambling joints and opium dens but his plans, which included a second film, were abandoned. Thirteen years later, when Wong made 2046, his sixth film with Leung, there was a pang of recognition from many viewers.

It wasn't only that his character, Chow Mo-wan, was another version of the man that Leung played in

In the Mood for Love: it was also that he seemed to be a reprise of that enigmatic figure from Days of Being Wild.

In In the Mood for Love, Chow was a yearning, heartfelt figure, folded in on himself, attracted to his neighbour (Maggie Cheung), apparently without realising, or perhaps simply not acknowledging, that his wife was having an affair with her husband. In the disconcerting parallel universe of 2046, Chow is a different kind of man: a player, a heartbreaker and a gambler. This time, he sports a pencil moustache.

Leung insisted to the director that he needed a physical marker, a way of defining tangibly for himself that he was playing a character who was the same yet different. Curiously, both aspects of the man reminded Leung, he says, of his father, his memories of a man he had barely seen since early childhood.

His next movie is a much-anticipated project, John Woo's Red Cliff. After many years in Hollywood — and an increasingly dispiriting output — Woo is completing a big-budget, two-part period epic in China, for release this year. There have been plenty of dramas associated with the production, including the abrupt last-minute withdrawal of Woo's best-known long-term collaborator, actor Chow Yun-fat. And Leung turned down a part at one point, only to come back on board in another role, the character who was to have been played by Chow.

Another film , about Bruce Lee's martial arts master, has also been some time on the drawing board. It might remain on the drawing board, or as Leung has observed wryly, it could easily go in another direction. It's a Wong Kar-wai movie, after all, and Leung might find himself, he has told interviewers, walking the streets at night, smoking a cigarette. But as long as he knows what he has in his pockets, he's ready.
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cutiepie



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 60

PostPosted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 8:01 pm    Post subject:

Pretty good article about Tony.
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