Freedom: HK star Leslie Cheung with Joy at Vancouver home

He was a pop star in Hong Kong but Leslie Cheung now looks to movies, and Vancouver, for a new life   

IDOL FELL IN LOVE 

WITH VANCOUVER  

PETER BIRNIE

Sun Movie Critic

FOR HONG KONG actor and former pop-music idol Leslie Cheung, the Chinese launch of Farewell My Concubine was truly a truth stranger than fiction.  Directed by Chen Kaige, Farewell My Concubine tells of a tangled triangle that devel­ops between a prostitute and two members of the Peking Opera.  Now nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film, it had already won a Paime d'Or at Cannes when the director and his actors, including Cheung, flew into the Chinese capital last year.

"There wasn't anybody at the airport when we arrived in Beijing," Cheung recalls. "No tickets were allowed to sell for the premiere.  Old friends of Chen Kaige sold tickets by the roadside!"  

Cheung says he should have seen what was coming a couple of days before, when the Farewell tour started in Shanghai. "They briefed the reporters: You can interview Leslie Cheung, but you can't ask anything about Farewell."

Raised in Hong Kong and educated in England, Cheung had no experience of China's heavy-handed politics when.  In 1992, Chen asked him to star in the epic. Cheung's first trip to the capital to film Farewell was an eye-opener.  "They were pretty cold when I first arrived in Beijing," he says of former Red Guard Chen, his cast and crew.  "They tried to put me to the wall."  Cheung sensed resentment from co-star Gong Li, who was used to top-billing in Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, Judou, Raise the Red Lantern and The Story of Qiu Ju.  And actor Zhang Fengyi had trouble dealing with the movie's homosexual under­current between the two men.  "It requires some body language, the two of us together," Cheung says. "It's very hard to play my part with him, because he can't convince himself."  The clash of egos ended when Cheung made it clear to the mainlanders that he was more than a Hong Kong poster boy with a string of platinum pop-music hits and kung-fu films. In fact, Cheung had balanced his more in commercial roles with work under some of Hong Kong's best directors: John Woo (A Better Tomorrow and its sequel), Ching Siu-tung (A Chinese Ghost Story and it sequel), Stanley Kwan (Rouge) and Wong Kar-wai (Days of Being Wild).

He recently returned to mainland China to work with Wong on Legend of the Eagle-Shooting Hero, a political allegory which will probably draw its own fire from Chi­nese authorities.  And Cheung goes back to Beijing in June to join Chen again, this time in Shadow of a Flower.

"Have you seen Dangerous Liaisons?" he asks over lunch at his Vancouver home. "It's pretty much the same and I'm playing the John Malkovich part."  With His films in full flight, Cheung has no regrets about choosing in 1990 to end a 10-year singing career that has filled a room in his home with platinum records and music awards.  Inspiration to walk away at the height of his fame came from Japanese singer Momoe Yamaguchi. who also stopped at the top of the pops. When Che­ung called a Hong Kong press conference to unveil a new record and upcom­ing concerts, "they thought that I was just doing one of the usual publici­ty stunts," he says with a laugh. But with show-biz panache, Cheung drew a large curtain to reveal that these would be his farewell concerts: the Final Encounters tour.

Judging from the laser disc of one such concert, Cheung is lucky to have emerged from the throng of adoring young women without losing a limb.  He left behind a tongue-in-cheek rivalry with fellow star Alan Tam.  "We were always fighting each other for the awards," he says, "but we're the best of friends."  Now in his mid-30s, Cheung knows the Hong Kong music mill will always crank out another idol to fill a quota that's dubbed "the Top Four."  "There were four guys coming up, just like us, so it was kind of funny," he says. "When I watch tele­vision now, I find the shadows like they're doing the things that we did before."

Cheung fell in love with Vancouver when he first toured here in 1987, but motivation to move didn't come until the 1989 massacre in Tienanmen Square. He refers to China's plans to swallow Hong Kong as "the '97 bur­den."  Despite a fear of flying (and claustrophobia to boot), Cheung will con­tinue the long commute between Canada and Hong Kong.  "I've had a lot of offers from Hollywood now, but I'm still thinking," he says. "I'm pretty big in Hong Kong and I don't want to lose my fans because I'm going to do some lousy Grade C or D movie in Hollywood."  Cheung has already encountered the subtle racism that keeps Asian actors shut out of all but stereotypi­cal roles in most Hollywood features.  "One of the production companies tried to line me up with Keanu Reeves, acting as a ninja. I said, “Don't ask me to play a ninja”.  Cheung even questions friend John Woo's move to Tinseltown.  "I don't think he's doing the right thing in Hollywood at all.  He called me up when doing Hard Target in New Orleans; he was complaining that people were cutting his budget and his time."  Despite his reservations, Cheung flies to Hollywood this week in preparation for next Monday's Academy Awards.  If the pundits are right and Farewell My Concubine adds to its list of prizes (Paime d'Or, Golden Globe, L.A. and New York film critics associations), will he be more likely to stay on this side of the Pacific?  "I don't know anything about Hollywood," he says, laughing again. "I'm just an ordinary moviegoer!"