Chang Chen Incomplete Draft

Incomplete draft written for Criterion.

It’s no stretch to say that Chang Chen is one of the key Taiwanese actors of the past thirty years. He began his acting career at fourteen with Edward Yang’s epochal masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991), inaugurating a career involving collaborations 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. Chief among these filmmakers has been Wong Kar-wai, with whom he has worked four times. The Hong Kong auteur was the first director that Chang worked with after Yang, and their collaboration offers a few things that no other actor in Wong’s considerable repertory cast provides: a Taiwanese actor, and therefore even more of an outsider than the few mainland stars, who similarly speak Mandarin among Cantonese speakers, and an unmolded performer at the beginning of his career, whose screen presence and roles thus shift profoundly with each film. This youthfulness is put to pointed use in Chang’s first Wong film, Happy Together (1997). In the tortured, mutually destructive pas de deux undergone by Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, two of the greatest Hong Kong actors of their generation, Chang is the only other significant character, a Taiwanese tourist strapped for cash in Buenos Aires who strikes up a friendship with Leung. His role is deliberately ambiguous, especially in his sexuality: he alludes to difficulties with his parents, seems to be attracted to the sound of Leung’s voice, and shrugs off a woman’s advances. But most of all he represents a radiance, an innocence that has long been absent from the two lovers’ lives. Notably, Chang would get his own duet and his true showcase with The Hand (2004), a feature-length version of Wong’s contribution to the Eros omnibus. Chang’s other two Wong appearances are far more peripheral, although to different aims. In the cavalcade of veritable ghosts from the past that comprises 2046 (2004), where recurring Wong actors appear in roles just a little different from their original incarnations, he appears in exactly one shot in the flesh, as a jealous drummer boyfriend, and in a few scattered moments in the story-within-the-story. More telling is his storyline in The Grandmaster (2013), where he appears as a mysterious government agent named The Razor for only three scenes and interacting with a character from the “main” narrative just once. In a film dedicated to many kung fu masters, who ultimately fall into the annals of history while Ip Man (Leung) lives on, he ultimately becomes one of them. As ever, though he is set apart, he emerges as every bit the equal of the more glamorous Hong Kong stars, an actor marching to his own inimitable rhythm. As a thespian, 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 central story, Chang tends to be on the outside looking in, a slightly aloof and inscrutable figure even when he is one of the leads. 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 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 in his sexuality, but most of all he represents 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), a feature-length version of Wong’s contribution to the Eros omnibus. As a tailor who develops an intense relationship with a high-class call girl (Gong Li), his nigh-ageless appearance becomes paramount to the film. For most of the film he could be anywhere between twenty and forty years old, which, when coupled with understated jumps in time, 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 veritable 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, a state of suspension that perfectly represents his unique, essential presence in Wong’s oeuvre.