In Focus: Leslie Cheung
A mini retrospective on the famed Cantopop singer and actor, Leslie Cheung, as one can’t think of Hong Kong without thinking of his many achievements contributing to Hong Kong’s cultural memory.
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A mini retrospective on the famed Cantopop singer and actor, Leslie Cheung, as one can’t think of Hong Kong without thinking of his many achievements contributing to Hong Kong’s cultural memory.
Wong Kar Wai, 1997, Hong Kong, 96 min
Hong Kong cinema superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung play a pair of lovers living out the waning days of their relationship as expatriates in Buenos Aires. Lusty tango bars, the salsa music of the La Boca sidewalks, and a hypnotic visit to the nearby Iguazu Falls give further dimension to the tensions growing between the two. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Wong’s Happy Together is a stunning display of filmmaking style and a touching story of love on the brink of dissolution.
Stanley Kwan, 1987, Hong Kong, 96 min
Kwan, who would not long after this film’s release become Hong Kong’s first openly gay director, crafts an elegant and enormously moving love story that comments on both changing cultural mores and the persistence of the past in the city’s present. Modern newspaperman Yuen (Alex Man) meets a seemingly disoriented woman, Fleur (Cantopop diva Anita Mui), dressed in the garb of the 1930s, placing a “Missed Encounters”-type ad. As it transpires, she’s the ghost of a woman who suicided in 1934, seeking the lover who failed to meet her in the afterlife, played in flashbacks by Leslie Cheung. A beautiful and beguiling paean to a city ever-changing and eternal that cleaned up at the 8th Hong Kong Film Awards, including a Best Original Film Song win for Mui’s performance of the theme. — Metrograph
Wong Kar Wai, 1990, Hong Kong, 95 min
In Focus: Leslie Cheung
Wong Kar Wai’s breakthrough sophomore feature represents the first full flowering of his swooning signature style. This ravishing existential reverie is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the 1960s in which a band of wayward twenty-somethings—including a disaffected playboy (Leslie Cheung), a lovelorn woman (Maggie Cheung) hopelessly enamored with him, and a policeman (Andy Lau) caught in the middle of their turbulent relationship—pull together and push apart in a cycle of frustrated desire