Chang Chen First Draft

Complete first draft written for Criterion.

As a performer, Chang Chen specializes in observing and listening. One of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years, he began his career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and has worked with some of the most notable contemporary Chinese-speaking directors, from Yang to Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Woo to Ang Lee, in both his native country and in China and Hong Kong. Across his career, whether by dint of almost exclusively speaking Mandarin among Cantonese speakers or playing people on the periphery of the story, Chang tends to be on the outside looking in, a slightly aloof and inscrutable figure even when he’s at the center. I have long held an intense admiration for him, in large part because I see something of myself in his characters: a young Taiwanese man living in another place, who always feels like an outsider constantly attempting to understand those around him. Few filmmakers have harnessed that odd-man-out quality as well as Wong Kar-wai, with whom Chang has worked four times. In return, their collaboration offers something that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the destructive pas de deux between Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, Chang is the only other significant character. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially his sexuality, but he does represent a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. In a film shadowed by the Handover, where characters struggle to break out of the cages of their past, his nationality is no accident: he and Taiwan stand out as beacons of hope, of a possible future where tears and pain can be left behind. Chang would get his own duet and true showcase with The Hand (2004), Wong’s short contribution to the Eros omnibus, recently expanded to feature-length. As a tailor who develops an intense relationship with a high-class call girl (Gong Li), his nigh-ageless appearance becomes indispensable to the film. For most of the film he could be anywhere between twenty and forty years old, a temporal blurriness which, when coupled with understated jumps in chronology, deliberately unmoors the film from any conventional sense of time, allowing the pair’s longing to assume a floating yet palpable grandness and tragedy. His quiet countenance is here deployed as a mask for his ardent emotions, holding until it is shattered at the close. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. He is one fleeting face amid the cavalcade of ghosts from Wong’s past that comprises 2046 (2004). More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013). Though he appears in only three scenes and interacts with a character from the main narrative just once, he registers profoundly as a kung fu master among equals. He is simultaneously set apart and within the fold, in a state of suspension that perfectly represents his unique, essential presence in Wong’s oeuvre.