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[ESSAY] “Tony Leung in the Cinema: Between Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur” by Liew KH

^{Tony Leung}

WKW went to Bangkok to film In the Mood for Love because there was no place like Hong Kong anymore in Hong Kong.

Tail end of December 2023. I’m standing in line with the crowd, waiting for Tony Leung to arrive at the Aurum Theatre in TRX Kuala Lumpur, the latest san see hang shopping mall in town. It’s a little past six, but the space around the entrance is already packed by the time I reach the top of the escalator. Tony is only arriving at eight, according to the emcees, speaking in both English and Mandarin. However, it’s not for the film I had in mind. He’s got a new one out on the 30th, a financial crime caper à la The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) called The Goldfinger (2023). But I’ll see him in anything, so I’ll stand in line.

The usual premiere paraphernalia abound: wall-sized posters of Tony, glittering backdrops, a chandelier no less, cordoned-off space for famous nobodies. Next to me, at the barriers lining the red carpet, is a young woman in a dark dress and tasteful boots. She’s attractive in a casual sense, the kind you would eye sidelong without registering any feature worth remembering.

But the lonely diehards, these you can spot immediately. There’s a certifiable Wong Kar-wai couple directly across from me, the stout girlfriend with a bouquet of flowers, the balding boyfriend with a marker pen in one hand, tapping away on a copy of Chungking Express (1994), its cover in moody green. The rest of us hold out our phones like votive offerings, ready to livestream Tony in the flesh to whoever cares enough to watch. These two could’ve been Takeshi Kaneshiro and Fish Leung from Fallen Angels (1995), I thought, if those characters had met with a different outcome in the film, after speeding out of the Cross Harbour Tunnel into life’s real light, middle-aged and weary.

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Occasionally, the woman next to me leans her head against my arm while typing away on her phone, killing time. I don’t mind, actually, so I ask whether she’s tired, whether she’s been waiting long, small talk among fans. All without looking at her, of course.

“Sorry,” she says in English. “I speak Chinese.”

She turns to lean her head against the cold steel barrier instead.

When Tony finally arrives at eight, the crowd goes berserk. Rarely do you get a superstar here in this part of the world. They head down to Singapore or up north to Bangkok or even farther afield to Jakarta if the occasion really calls for it, but never to the stretch of space between these cities. For good reason.

Tony saunters along the designated red carpet in a white tuxedo jacket half a size too large for him, complete with a bow tie. Streaks of grey hair. He’s ageing around the eyes a little, just enough to let you know that the man is mortal still, and he’s shorter than you think, seen this close. How humbling, time and grace.

He must’ve been surprised by the love for him. Screams and shrieks pave his steps all the way to the opening stage, all the way down the stairs when he descends to greet the other amassed crowd a floor below, trailing after him when the opening ceremony ends and echoing behind him into the screening hall.

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This is not a review of The Goldfinger. This is a note to his greatest triumph, rereleased for one week only from 14 March 2024 onwards to capitalise on the supposedly Asian Valentine’s Day, White Day, as it’s called, a month after the original. The one that made him God. The one that I finally watched in a cinema after all these years, also at the Aurum, where Tony Leung and I were clearly more than 0.01 cm apart on that day in December. You know which one. The one in which he rehabilitated the Chinese male from a sexless animal so thoroughly as to erase even the traumas inflicted upon him for a century and more across the globe: the denigrations, the emasculation, the legal violations. No Bruce Lee abs required. No mou lei tao Stephen Chow one-liners to peel panties off, no slapstick Jackie Chan stunts, no Cold War espionage or gimmicky gadgetry. Just a plain old love story of sorts.

But the only version of In the Mood for Love officially allowed in theatres now is the 4K remastered one, part of a box set by the Criterion Collection and Wong Kar Wai, released in 2021. Colours were regraded, punched up and down, dialogue was accidentally burned away, new and old scenes were reused, aspect ratios be damned. WKW quoted that famous Heraclitus fragment about stepping into a river twice in defence of his revisions, in his pursuit of a past that never was, never could be. This most Proustian of filmmakers from this side of the world cannot leave his works behind as time capsules of a real past now gone.

You can read all the arguments about the remasters elsewhere. This is about Tony Leung, a love letter to him. Or the Tony Leung I tried to be. This is the note that I should have written to my younger self, long in the making, belated and bereft. What with time and all that.

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They sashay around in tailored suits and even more tailored cheongsams, Tony and Maggie, to borrowed strings that mourn for them when they themselves cannot. Exquisite sorrow. Not one gelled hair out of place, not one crease or crumple in her skirt.

But you can’t dress like Tony here around the equator, in grey polyester suits over starched white shirts, choking on a silk-blend tie in the afternoon heat, sweat seeping from your wrists into your cuffs. You can’t walk in slow motion in stiff leather shoes to the mamak or chap fan place for dinner without a pulsing sore on your heels. People will wonder where the hell you came from that was raining so hard. That’s why WKW had Tony’s Singaporean landlord wear sarongs and singlets instead of trousers.

However, WKW wisely retained the oily shine on Tony’s face, on his forehead and cheekbones, throughout the film. Almost a mark of pride.

WKW went to Bangkok to film In the Mood for Love because there was no place like Hong Kong anymore in Hong Kong, no pavements and alleyways and cramped staircases and even more cramped living spaces of the 1960s whence he came. Luminaries of Hong Kong cinema such as Stephen Teo and others have already written extensively about fictional and real-life stand-ins for Hong Kong and its imaginary ideals, so I won’t add more here.

In late 2013 and 2014, I went looking for the places in Bangkok where WKW might have shot In the Mood for Love: Charoen Krung, Yaowarat, the more decrepit inner parts of the city, when mass protests had the city barricaded by anger and violence for months on end over the fate of Thaksin Shinawatra’s political dynasty. My friends cautioned me not to go. My own government cautioned me not to. But a broken heart can make you do wondrous things, like seeking refuge at the last bastion of protest camped at Lumpini Park after wasting money on drink and women, before bombs started flying, before the army came to rule for the next decade.

I own almost every iteration of In the Mood for Love and its sequel 2046 available for home release. Not legally, of course. They’re all pirated off the web. The earlier Criterion DVDs, the French imports, the Korean Blu-rays. I’ve even watched all seven of the latest 4K remasters, good and bad. I bought the hefty WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai, its cover not as red as my bank account after purchasing it. So why bother paying to see a film that I’ve seen countless times before, having memorised every microgesture on Tony’s and Maggie’s faces, their neighbours’ faces, Ah Ping’s, every shade of fallen shadow? Is it the intimacy of crowds being alone together that’s missing? Or were the remasters meant to be seen on a truly large screen, so that the greens and blues and yellows and reds could be appreciated, savoured?

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Maybe it’s because of the times. Maybe it would remind me that, once upon a time, I would’ve loved to have done what Tony did to Maggie, stringing her along in play-pretend as part of some demented revenge. No revenge is sweeter than sleeping with the wife of the lover who cuckolded you, some dark victory against your wife and her lover. And quizás, quizás, quizás, maybe find love again in a hopeless place, in the act of make-believe.

Perhaps the Holy Grail of the haphazardly varied releases of In the Mood for Love is the original 35 mm print brought all the way down here to Kuala Lumpur during the film’s initial run in the early 2000s, rumoured to be stashed in some warehouse still, probably rotting if not properly stored, but most likely in a landfill now, given the realities of this country.

Of course, by being here in the cinema, I’m part of the nostalgia machine, however niche compared with the larger malaise of nostalgia that has a stranglehold on this part of the world. To cinema’s black screen, then, not the black mirror in our hands. Because the little hole into which Tony whispers his secrets at Angkor Wat is not large enough to contain what’s wounding us from within, from without. We need one sufficiently large to overwhelm us, to overcome us, to loom over our puny miseries. To absorb our anxieties, our sad secrets, the fear of change, of death, like the alien void of a tuba hole or phonograph cylinder or whatever it is that Faye Wong whispers into at the start of 2046, from which the dazzlingly beautiful can emerge. So that the stand-ins for our heartache and our ardour and our denied consummation that only cinema can provide might redeem us, once upon a time at 24 frames per second, now at gigabytes per second, bathing us all in blinding light.

But the screen is no longer the refuge it once was, no? Maggie’s vivid cheongsams, the turquoise one, the white one with blue flowers, are now stained with forced patina; the red curtains now billow in dried-blood tones. Her flesh is jaundiced with artificial age. Was this really what it was, how it was meant to be seen? Is my memory betraying me? Did I remember it wrongly? How could I remember something so differently? Is this the past, or is this the present? Why is the present presenting the past as something it wasn’t?

Before we last see Tony at Angkor Wat, a short piece of documentary footage showing Charles de Gaulle at Pochentong Airport in 1966 plays, marking the beginning of the Vietnam War. There’s a brief shot of the prince and queen of Cambodia arriving to welcome de Gaulle at his plane, then a panning shot from a moving car, presumably part of the presidential entourage, of the 200,000-strong crowd cheering the procession along the 10 km road to Phnom Penh. It ends in a pixel burst of black noise, overextended, overzoomed, overwhelmed by the pain of the near and the real.

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March 2024. Everywhere, Allah’s socks are the talk. When was it ever otherwise, in this part of the world, among these natives trying to turn the entire country into some sixteenth-century desert wonderland? America might begrudge affirmative action for its minorities, but it is only in this part of the world where the majority continues to enjoy it as blatantly hostile law, no matter how much apologists might submit otherwise, topped up with a little jizya tax on kaffirs like us in the form of vehement vitriol from resentful rent-seekers, for political expediency or wayward theology, directed at just another Chinese businessman whose contribution to the economy was to import millions of socks into the country from mainland China, five of which somehow, miraculously, carried their god’s name on them.

It has happened before. It will happen again. It will never stop happening.

I don’t know how The Goldfinger ends, but with Tony playing a charismatic financier at the centre of the 1980s Carrian scandal in Hong Kong, it can’t be good. But you can’t say the same about Jho Low, our pride and joy. No other film could contain him, not even Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, funded by the billions that Jho Low stole. It’s as if he knew what lay ahead of him, so he brought one of the world’s greatest directors in to make a near-masterpiece, a self-portrait in disguise, both of himself and of this country. Because what lies ahead of him, and any of us here, is exile. Cunning. Silence.

Less than five minutes after the film starts, after Insta-filtered Maggie appears onscreen to apologise for disturbing her future landlady’s dinner, I walk out of the cinema.

At TRX, or just about everywhere, there are too many Chinese tourists. Good for the economy, of course. This country is going to need all the money it can get to pay off the world’s largest kleptocracy case to date, but most of it will come from us, obviously, and from our unborn grandchildren’s insurance. If there are any of us left to breed.

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Hong Kong feared losing itself when it returned to the mainland, feared losing whatever it was that made it special: money, culture, language. Feared being subsumed into a behemoth of uncaring indifference, becoming just another city with Chinese characteristics. Welcome to the club, greetings from across the sea. You might learn a thing or two from us, or maybe don’t. We’re bad examples. We flee like our forefathers before us. Why love a mother who treats you like the stepchild you always are, forever playing second fiddle to natives accorded special privileges from birth until death and beyond?

After successfully publishing their collaborative wuxia newspaper serial, Tony goes to Singapore to escape the gossipmongers talking about him and Maggie. It is a trick he plays on her, testing her love for him, testing whether she will follow him there. He meets Ah Ping, his buddy, who arrived earlier to do reconnaissance work. After some cajoling on Ah Ping’s part to get him to open up, Tony tells him that cryptic story about going up a mountain, finding a suitable tree, carving a hole in the trunk, confessing whatever unbearable secrets you have into it, and sealing it with mud. Ping’s reply is one for the ages. He would rather go and get laid instead.

Singapore, at the time of Tony’s arrival in the late 1960s, had separated itself from the Federation of Malaysia. Irreconcilable differences, as history shows. Look where we are now.

The last time I saw the couple that day at the Aurum, they were still waiting for Tony outside the cinema while the dwindling crowd dispersed. Maybe they never got to give Tony their flowers, never got him to sign their copy of Chungking Express. Maybe they did.

I have an interview soon for a job as an auxiliary police officer in Singapore. I get to wear a uniform. I get to help old women carry their groceries across the street, direct traffic, patrol and write daily reports, out in the heat, away from sitting on my arse all day in a job that does not know it is already obsolete. But better a slave than an animal chained to some words on paper, I say. At least slaves can revolt, however remote the possibility in the 21st century. Animals here can only gnaw themselves free.

And I no longer have any use for nostalgia.

^{How to cite: Liew, KH. “Tony Leung in the Cinema: Between Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/06/tony-leung.}

Liew KH dabs on YSL before heading out to play pool at night in an older part of Kuala Lumpur. By day, he performs due diligence on grammar and typos in corruption and money-laundering reports for a risk consultancy. In his secret life, he is working on a doorstopper of a novel, in Malay, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka and Hokkien, about nativities and torn loyalties. How else is he to make a living from an obsolete English degree? Please do not say copywriting or lawyering. When he does manage to save some money, he adds it to a national retirement fund, hoping one day to visit the motherland. Some place called Tam Shui, according to family lore.