LESLIE LOST
In a region already unnerved by the outbreak of the SARS contagion, the reaction to Leslie's dreadful April Fool's shock was swift and volcanic. His Hong Kong fans, many of them in audible tears, clogged the radio shows with their grief and love. The
www.lesliecheung.com website, which offered fans worldwide a memory book to sign, received so many hits it was virtually impossible to get through for 24 hours. Wong Kar-wai and Chen Kaige issued messages of grieving.
I too felt shocked. And pissed. Mourning gave way to rancor: he had no right to do this, to deprive us of his brilliance, his overbite, his presence on earth. A star's magnificence is a gift, not to himself, but to us. We, his fans and friends, are the ones to say it's over�and ain't over. No one is so possessive as the bereft. We buy into a star and want a lifetime guarantee. Ours.
Grady Hendrix, the Shakespeare of the Subway Cinema movie collective, expressed this poignantly in a message he sent me yesterday:
"Leslie was supposed to be bright, and beautiful, and brittle, and bitchy forever. ... [But] when Leslie Cheung killed himself he was just a guy... a guy who was looking in the mirror and seeing a receding hairline, an expanding waistline, a lack of options. He didn't see the hopes and dreams we had all projected onto him, he was seeing lines around his eyes that he had never seen before. ... And he was lonely, so lonely that he couldn't bear the thought of being alive for even one more minute. ... I look at Leslie Cheung in The Chinese Feast and I can't make the guy on-screen the guy in the hotel room who killed himself. ... Trying to reconcile these two men makes my heart ache and my eyes water."It happens that my wife Mary and I knew Leslie a little, and had been in his thrall before we met him. At the 1993 Cannes Film Festival we saw The Bride With White Hair and Farewell My Concubine. The first was martial-arts fantasy, the second historical epic: The Sunshine Boys reconfigured as tragedy spanning a half-century of Chinese heartbreak. To see an actor play the world-weary swordsman in love with a wolf woman (Brigitte Lin) and homosexual masochist in love with his stolid partner (Zhang Fengyi) was a revelation. Returning to New York, I rented as many Leslie Cheung movies as I could find at Kim's Video, and that spurred me into the colony's burgeoning filmography. As much as anyone, Leslie hooked me on Hong Kong movies.
We later met the star a few times, as I will tabulate later. And we figured to see him next week, on our first trip to Hong Kong in three years; the director Yonfan said he hoped to arrange a meal for us with Leslie and Brigitte! Even I feared that was too much legend for one dinner table. But SARS was aligned against us. We postponed our trip to Hong Kong. And we will never see Leslie, except in dreams on the screen, and on the screen of our dreams.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,440214,00.html#ixzz1OB2K2jKQ