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Tony Leung’s 12 best films: before Marvel’s Shang-Chi the Hong Kong icon made history in Infernal Affairs, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution … and 7 seminal Wong Kar-wai movies
STORYTribune News Service
- Before his big Hollywood Marvel debut, aged 59, Tony Leung Chiu-wai made history in dozens of Chinese-language classics by John Woo, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and more
- As acclaimed auteur Wong Kar-wai’s go-to leading man, Leung led art house favourites including In the Mood For Love, 2046, Chungking Express and Happy Together
In the swooningly beautiful 1990 film Days of Being Wild, Tony Leung Chiu-wai gets one of the greatest entrances – and exits – ever accorded an actor in a single movie. Remarkably, the entrance and the exit are the same scene.
In the movie’s final moments, the seminal writer-director Wong Kar-wai turns the camera on a character we haven’t met yet: a handsome young card sharp in a low-ceilinged flat, preparing for a night on the town. Who this man is and how he relates to the other characters in this drifty 60s Hong Kong roundelay is a mystery. Still, you can tell a lot about him just from the way he buffs his nails, runs a comb through his hair and casually slips a deck into his pocket. He’s all slippery elegance and wily charm, someone whose mere presence renders words superfluous. He’s Tony Leung Chiu-wai, in other words – not to be confused with Tony Leung Ka-fai, the other beloved icon of Hong Kong cinema.
These are the [performances] I can’t imagine his career without, the ones in which this famed heartthrob, whether luxuriating in whorls of cigarette smoke or whispering a sacred secret, becomes as much the desirer as the desired
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That quietly heart-stopping introduction/farewell marked the start of something extraordinary. After Days of Being Wild, Wong and Leung went on to make six more features together, a hopefully unfinished collaboration that cemented them both as world-cinema titans. (Many of them are available in Criterion Collection’s lavish Wong Kar-wai box set, which was released earlier this year.)
But if Leung has been Wong’s most steadfast on-screen muse, over the past 40 years he’s racked up credits with no shortage of other noteworthy filmmakers, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou and Tran Anh Hung. He’s played husbands and lovers, gangsters and cops, dynastic warlords and kung fu masters, heroes and villains. He’s become a sex symbol, a style icon and one of the world’s biggest movie stars – all without ever appearing in a Hollywood movie.
Until now. Leung is getting a lot of attention for his work in the new Marvel superhero epic Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. As Shang-Chi’s estranged father and one of Marvel’s more notorious supervillains, the Mandarin, Leung gives a playful, brooding and ultimately devastating performance that’s even more resonant – emotionally, aesthetically, iconographically – if you’ve seen some of his others.
Here is my extremely non-definitive list of 12 all-time great Leung films and performances, presented in no particular order and as a series of double bills. It omits some of my personal favourites and perhaps some of yours. But for those encountering Leung for the first time in Shang-Chi and eager to see more, all of these should be considered essential viewing.
Ashes of Time (1994) and Hero (2002)