Fandom (3)--An idiosyncratic view from the inside

I often wonder when, exactly, I fell under the spell of Leslie Cheung.  It wasn't love at first sight, a coup de foudre moment.  The first encounter I had with Leslie I didn't even like him.  He did such a good job playing a manipulative, whining, ass-hole in Happy Together that I positively disliked him.   But, since I was watching the film for Tony Leung's performance, I guess that might be understandable since Leslie's nasty piece of work, Ho Po-Wing, was the start (and finish) of all of Tony's Lai Yiu Fai misery.  That was June 2007 and I was a newbie Hong Kong/Asian film fan, having come in through the back door of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. Happy Together was only the fourth Chinese/Hong Kong film I had ever seen.  In Hero, I fell for Tony Leung in a big way and wanted to see more of his work.  In the Mood For Love was next and after that, his fan page said Happy Together was one of his best performances.  Someone had just given me a Netflix trial subscription, so I selected Happy Together.  It was a very good choice, as it turns out.  My second Wong Kar-Wai film, and I was hooked on his work (and that of Chris Doyle and William Chang). Soon after, I was going through the check-out line at Borders and noticed a DVD on the bargain rack that was vaguely familiar:  Farewell, My Concubine.  I remember hearing in the mid-90s that it was a great film and that it had won a Golden Globe.  On a whim, and seeing Gong Li on the cover, I picked it up and added it to my purchases.  I took it home, put it on a shelf, and promptly forgot about it.  June turned into July, July into August and August was soon going to be September.  I watched at least one Hong Kong or Mainland film every week, but nothing with Leslie Cheung.  One night, looking through my new stack of DVDs, I ran across Farewell, My Concubine and on a whim thought, what the hell, I'll just watch it and see if its any good.  I enjoyed the first hour, when the young boys are training to be opera stars, but I can't say it was a revelation.  Then the film moved ahead some years and the boys were now grown men, and one of those men was Leslie Cheung.  The first scene with Leslie playing the role of Concubine Yu marks the before and after moment of my awareness of Leslie Cheung.  I knew instantly that here was an actor that effected me in a way no other actor had before (or has since).  There was something about Leslie that moved me, excited me and shook me in an almost unsettling way.  There really didn't seem to be any separation between the actor and his role.  Not only that, there was a fluidity in his expression of gender, male and female perfectly blended, that I had never seen before.  He wasn't simply a man playing an actor who impersonated female roles on the stage.  He was a creature who was equal parts male and female, and who could naturally access whatever gender traits he needed to play his role.  This was a prophetic discovery, as I would later see. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb0u3bmflII&feature=relatedVideo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_QesIywGo&feature=relatedVideo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQxHbWIQqsk&feature=related