Perhaps no one has done this better than Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, one of Wong Kar Wai’s principal collaborators and a legend of Hong Kong cinema. The mark of a good actor, it is often said, is the ability to slip invisibly into a role. Though we haven’t covered every one of the director’s greatest stars, we hope this series of nine tributes illuminates a significant part of his films’ legacy. In celebration of our box set World of Wong Kar Wai, released earlier this year and now playing on the Criterion Channel, we’ve gathered an array of U.S.-based writers with roots in various parts of the Chinese-speaking world-including critics, scholars, and novelists-to share what their favorite WKW actors have meant to them. These actors have also continued to capture the imagination of Asian audiences living on the other side of the world for those of us in the Sinophone diaspora, their performances in Wong’s breathtaking run of masterpieces offer the opportunity to see Asian talent on the big screen, portraying characters who are sexy, zany, romantic, unpredictable-everything we’ve rarely had a chance to be in American movies. As the local movie industry became increasingly transnational and Wong’s gaze turned outward, his stable of regular players grew to include more members hailing from elsewhere: Taiwan’s Chang Chen, China’s Gong Li.ĭecades later, the intensifying geopolitical conflicts within the region have made the short-lived golden age of Hong Kong stardom-which kicked into high gear in the 1980s and began to wane at the turn of the millennium-all the more poignant. In front of his camera, they achieved a richness of emotion that came to define Hong Kong cinema at a particularly explosive political moment, when the former British colony was shrouded by the anxiety of its handover to Mainland China in 1997. Working with Wong, these stars were able to stretch their talents and collaborate in a slower, less formulaic creative process. At least in the West, appraisals of these actors’ work often focus exclusively on their beauty and glamour, neglecting their cultural resonance beyond the realm of this one celebrated auteur.Ĭhinese-speaking viewers who encountered Wong’s movies in the nineties would have already been familiar with Maggie Cheung Man Yuk, Leslie Cheung Kwok Wing, and Tony Leung Chiu Wai through the dozens of roles they had played in films and TV shows, mostly pop entertainment that conformed to the industry standard of being cheap and easy to produce. But the collective story of these key collaborators remains an underappreciated one. It’s impossible to imagine the films of Wong Kar Wai-or the global art-house phenomenon they generated-without these extraordinary performers at its heart, Wong’s cinema is an ode to their star power, and their artistry anchors his explorations of time, love, memory, and urban life. In the 1990s, Hong Kong was home to a staggering number of the most gifted and charismatic actors in the world.
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