I have just spent a week with Maggie Cheung. If you have heard of her, please feel free to swoon. If not, let me explain. Her ex-husband, the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, said that until he met her he no longer believed that cinema made movie stars with auras. Since the late 1990s and, in particular, since Wong Kar-wai's swoonably elegant In the Mood for Love (2000), critics have acclaimed Cheung as "an icon of modernity" and "the most fascinating woman in modern cinema." When, for the first time in its history, the Cannes film festival used a photographic image of a real actress on its poster, that actress was Maggie Cheung. She turned down the chance to be a Bond girl, was a woman warrior in the most commercially successful Chinese film of all time, Hero (2002), is the most famous woman in Hong Kong and one of the most famous in Asia. She came to Edinburgh, where I live, to talk about Chinese films and hang out.
I invited her because I am co-director of a festival called Cinema China, which is touring Britain. Where most festivals now have a film industry marketplace, ours has a series of lectures on Chinese history, society and aesthetics, presented by the University of Edinburgh. I think that's why Cheung came. We needed a major figure in contemporary Chinese film as our guest of honour, someone whose work would be a lens through which to view that nation's cinema and, we hoped, China and its people too.
What a lens Cheung turned out to be. One of the first things we talked about in her masterclass was the astonishing work rate of Hong Kong cinema. Cheung has been in 80 films since 1985, regularly making a dozen or more in a year. Some were cheap and forgettable, but many, like Dragon Inn (1992), are complexly engineered action films using thousands of shots, balletic choreography and gravity-defying pugilism. When asked how so many fine-tooled films could be made in such a short period, Cheung answered, "because Chinese people work harder than Europeans." As if to prove the point, the Chinese state television crew that was in Britain making a documentary about Cinema China kept filming well into the evening, long after the rest of us had conked out.
The third insight is a cinematic one. Maggie Cheung has been in five films by Hong Kong art-house maestro Wong Kar-wai, and is often called his muse. In fact, as she said on stage: "I am not Kar-wai's muse; William Chang is." Chang's name will be new even to hardcore film buffs, but look up his credits and you find that he not only edited In the Mood for Love but was its production and costume designer and associate producer. Those who have seen the film will remember that it takes its audience through a sultry nighttime world that has no temporal bearings, no sense of the next day arriving. Except that Cheung changes her cheongsam dresses—high-necked, slim-fitting, popular in cosmopolitan China since the 1920s—each day. Only by clocking the new dress do we know that the story has moved on. The dresses, Cheung's extraordinary hairdo and the film's dreamy musical rhythms all came from William Chang. He has worked on all Kar-wai's films and, it appears, confers on them much of their pictorial and rhythmic distinction. Chang has clearly been overlooked as one of the central figures in international art cinema.
Finally, compare Cheung in Hero to Angelina Jolie in Hollywood's Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, released around the same time. Both play women warriors, but where Jolie's film is kickass turbo feminism and she seems to exist on just one psychological plane, Cheung in Hero goes from meditative to mysterious, gnomic to supernaturally airborne, at rest to spinning through arabesques. I have argued often that such differences are partially explained by the influence of Buddhist aesthetics on eastern action cinema, but in this case they are emphasised by the contrast between Cheung and Jolie themselves. Both are beautiful and athletic, but Cheung's mastery of body language and sense of emotional containment make her a far more intriguing presence.
In real life, Maggie Cheung is also pretty fun: we walked up Edinburgh's Royal Mile singing Bay City Rollers songs, if you please.
