In the mood for Leung

The charisma of Tony Leung, star of the new "2046" and among the biggest stars in the world, is as potent offscreen as on.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug 5, 2005 | The notoriously obsessive, if brilliant, director Wong Kar Wai spent four years working on his most recent feature, "2046." The picture before that, the sultry brocade tone poem "In the Mood for Love," was initially supposed to involve four months of shooting; the schedule ultimately stretched to 15. For two of the greatest faces in the movies today -- Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, who starred in the film -- it must have felt something like being under a grueling fairy-tale spell, the sort of thing that leaves you perpetually exhausted even when you've dreamed you've gotten sleep.

We've been told the camera never lies, but that doesn't mean it necessarily tells the truth about its motives. What if the camera, with its notoriously seductive gaze, is capable of addiction? The more it gets, the more it wants: First it has Leung for four months, then for 15. So would four years be too much to ask? The camera doesn't just love Leung; it doesn't want to let him out of its sight. He's everything it wants in a man, and more -- old Hollywood by way of modern Hong Kong -- and the camera sees a reflection of its history in his very face.

Leung, 43, has been starring in Hong Kong movies for close to 15 years. (His full name is Tony Leung Chiu Wai, and he's not to be confused with Tony Leung Ka Fai, the actor who appeared in the 1992 film of Marguerite Duras' novel "The Lover.") Leung is one of Asia's (and therefore, the world's) biggest movie stars, the sort who's perpetually trailed by gossip columnists and paparazzi. But he can walk around virtually unrecognized in New York (outside of Chinatown, that is). Even so, astute Western moviegoers have had plenty of chances to see him: The early years of his film résumé (which followed a successful TV career in Hong Kong in the '80s) include John Woo pictures like "Bullet in the Head" and "Hard-Boiled." In the past two years alone, American audiences might have seen him in the deftly multilayered cop thriller "Infernal Affairs" (he also appears in one of its two sequels) or as a third-century assassin in Zhang Yimou's "Hero." But Leung may be best known -- among Western moviegoers, at least -- for his work with Wong, which spans six pictures, beginning with "Days of Being Wild" (1991). In 2000, he won the best actor award at Cannes for "In the Mood for Love," playing Mr. Chow, a soulful, wounded married man involved in a would-be romance with Mrs. Chan (Cheung), the wife of the man with whom his own wife is having an affair. And in "2046," a semi-sequel to "In the Mood for Love," he plays a version of the same character, although it seems he's been changed and hardened by experiences that the movie only hints at.

It's an astonishing performance, one that builds on the earlier character even as it wholly reinvents it. This Mr. Chow has the same smoldering elegance as the one we met in the earlier picture. But unlike the tender, ruminative, courtly man of that picture, this Mr. Chow channels whatever damage he's suffered into a kind of emotional cruelty, largely inflicted on the fragile, sensuous call girl who has fallen for him (played by Ziyi Zhang). It's as if this Chow is a new man who, perhaps as a form of cosmic punishment, has been fitted with the painful memories of the old one, without having been granted the gentlemanly resources of kindness and compassion that might help him deal with them. Leung takes a familiar character -- one for whom, in "In the Mood for Love," we may have come to feel something like love itself, as we watch him stroll through the shimmery shadows of early-1960s Hong Kong with Cheung (who appears only briefly in "2046," like a mirage of a memory) -- and shows us both his vulnerability and his sour, ravaged core. His behavior pains us, but we can't turn away from him. His charisma goes to work on us like a kind of sweet suffering.

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