📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILM
Leung Wing-Fai and Andy Willis (editors), East Asian Film Stars, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 236 pages.
You’re a Cantonese researcher rummaging through the library and cannot believe your eyes. There’s Maggie Cheung gracing the cover of a book. What’s the title? East Asian Film Stars. You pick it up and flip through the pages. No, it’s not a copy & paste of Wikipedia entries of East Asian film stars. It’s not a coffee table book either. There is really an academic book about Maggie Cheung as a film star.
Besides her, the book also covers Rain, Zhang Ziyi, Donnie Yen, and even older-generation stars like Kyo Machiko and Brigitte Lin. Obviously these are not mere biographies but analyses about how these figures have shaped arts and cultures in their countries and beyond.
When East Asian Film Stars was published in 2014, the power of stardom had been questioned for some time. Were Shia LaBeouf and Zoë Saldaña the main stars of Transformers or Avatar? Their fans aside, most people associate these two blockbusters with computer-generated imagery of the sentient robots and the blue-skinned aliens. The directors, Michael Bay and James Cameron, served as guarantors that these movies would be worth your time and money.
What the blockbusters of the late 2000s sold was the spectacle. Bay and Cameron were men who were enthusiastic about modern technologies and “wow” moments, not conservative auteurs who insisted on tradition and techniques. China, meanwhile, seemed to emerge as a new power in blockbuster productions in the early 2010s by marrying the spectacle of technology and stars. While we still cannot think of an international Chinese male lead, in the early 2010s Chinese studios prided themselves on their ability to hire Hong Kong and Hollywood stars, from Chow Yun-fat to Matt Damon. It seemed inevitable, at that time, that eventually the Chinese film industry would be as big as other East Asian industries.
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But how things have changed ten years later. Stars have returned to the limelight since their names and faces are crucial for the streaming services. Michelle Yeoh is the biggest Asian star in the world now, although she’s not in this book since she’s a Southeast Asian, not East Asian, film star. While most East Asian film stars are struggling to find lasting fame in Hollywood, more Asian American and British Asian actors have found firmer grounds and global recognition. Finally, the Chinese film industry and its stars are drifting apart not just from Hollywood but also compared to Japanese and Korean competitors. The upcoming Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s series The Three-Body Problem has less Chinese involvement than expected and will star Western actors of Chinese heritage rather than actors from China.
Back to the book. Daniel Martin (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology) had the honour of opening the book with an essay on how film stars were marketed differently according to their audiences. Asian films had attracted international attention in the 20th century based on their genres (from action in the West to romance in Asia), directors (from Akira Kurosawa to Hayao Miyazaki), and Orientalism (the perception of East Asia as both exotic and futuristic).
As the review of Asian exploitation films shows, there was an international Asian film boom in the 2000s, sparked by the Hollywood wuxia blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (CTHD) and ended with the “Asia Extreme” DVD category that lasted until the Great Recession. East Asian film industries had their specialities: anime and lone samurai films from Japan, revenge thrillers from Korea, historical epics from China, and psychological dramas like the Infernal Affairs trilogy and 2046 from Hong Kong.
Despite their diversity, all fell under the Asia Extreme label in Western DVD stores, and all were about laconic, brooding, and tough Asian men. And yet, Western critics were no longer feeling ashamed or nerdy in reviewing them.
Take Infernal Affairs. Sophisticated, intelligent, and subtle were the key words. There is blood and death, but it wasn’t the 20th-century blood-and-bullet feasts of Hong Kong action films. Tony Leung, who made his name in the Western press for In the Mood for Love, was promoted as a heartthrob and a serious actor. Ironically, while British reviews mentioned his Wong Kar-wai connection, the film itself was compared positively to John Woo’s bullet ballets, even though Leung was also a regular collaborator of Woo’s. In contrast, the Asia Extreme promotion for Infernal Killers promoted Leung and Andy Lau’s ties to Woo. The same film was promoted differently to different audiences. The broadsheet reviews were for bankers and architects, the DVD promos were for nerds.
Zhang Ziyi, meanwhile, had her time as the leading lady for Asia Extreme. Her appearances in CTHD and Rush Hour 2 made her the face of Hero and Musa: The Warrior in Western promotions, even though she was not the protagonist of both films.
Quentin Tarantino, who didn’t make any films in Asia, even became the face of Rolling Thunder, his distribution company, which imported Chungking Express, grouped as an “oddball film” together with Takeshi Kitano’s yakuza film Sonatine and exploitation flicks like Mighty Peking Man and Detroit 9000. In the USA, Tarantino was the face of Chungking Express, side-lining the then-unknown Wong Kar-wai.
The trend continued when the American posters for Hero proclaimed “Quentin Tarantino presents” and reviews for Oldboy referenced him. But did it mean that there were plenty of Asian directors as good and visionary as Tarantino? Was he the best Hollywood could offer? On the flip side, Martin argues that the reviewers also worried that when Asian films and stars were no longer marginal, they’d become mainstream, and mainstream is boring. For better or worse, the Asia Extreme fascination had stopped by 2010.
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Or maybe it’s just changing. After Asia Extreme, came the bigger tide, the Korean Wave. Actors of Korean ancestry had made regular appearances in American screens in the 2000s, from Rick Yune and Aaron Yoo in films to Sandra Oh and Daniel Dae Kim on TV. In 2009, two Korean stars, Rain and Lee Byung-hyun, became…ninjas. For a Korean this was insulting, so Nikki J.Y. Lee (Nottingham Trent University) called it “pop-orientalism” targeting both sides of the Pacific: new fans in the West and established fans in Asia.
One could say that Ninja Assassin represented peak multinational production. A Warner Bros. production co-produced by the Wachowskis, featuring Asian and European actors, and made in Germany in the Babelsberg Film Studio, the second-oldest studio still in business. The result was disappointing to say the least because all parties were more interested in making the film a portfolio: Rain for his international fame (he won the 2010 MTV Movie Award in the Biggest Badass category), the Wachowskis for their post-Matrix graphic novel films, and Babelsberg for its viability as a low-priced and efficient production location. As you know, afterwards the Korean film industry didn’t need American directors and European studios (and also Rain, who focused on TV after 2014) to conquer global theatres and awards.
Move on to our cover story of Maggie Cheung, written by Felicia Chan (University of Manchester), who also put Cheung as the cover image of her book on cosmopolitan cinema in East Asian films. Cheung won the Best Actress award at the 2004 Cannes for Clean, and the New York Times Magazine asked why she wasn’t a Hollywood star yet. Instead, it became her last feature film and she retired from stardom.
Chan examines the concept of cosmopolitanism and passing and how Cheung’s two French movies look at their limitations for most people. We have American actors passing as Europeans and Australians playing American roles. What about Asians? Assayas put up that question in Cheung’s first Western film, Irma Vep, where she plays herself, the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, hired to star in the remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent serial Les Vampires. The production ends up as a tragedy: the original director breaks down and his replacement cannot accept Cheung playing a French icon. Cheung rejects a farewell dance with her adoring costumer and departs for America.
Cheung and Assayas made their second film, Clean, after their divorce and it also examines her cosmopolitan identity. She plays a methadone-addicted video jockey, Emily Wang, who like many other Chinese, is uneasy with her cosmopolitanism. She’s fired from a Cantonese restaurant and then resigns from the Printemps department store, as she’s too French for one place and not French enough for another. She moves to San Francisco with the goal of persuading her parents in Vancouver that she’s clean enough to reclaim her son—a stranger in two significantly Cantonese cities.
Mimicking her French films, Cheung bowed out from the stage after her Cannes victory and turned to music production in China and Hong Kong after the publication of this book.
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Eerily, some film stars became representatives of their nations and sexes, and not just in Western perceptions. Joan Chen was the symbol of post-Mao Chinese cinema, where she was allowed to stand out in publications, and regularly played the roles of an innocent girl saved from the Cultural Revolution by self-correcting cadres.
She went to the United States and played guest roles in TV shows, including Miami Vice and MacGyver. When she got into motion pictures, her Chinese fans were upset as she played Manchurian era seductresses in both Tai-Pan and The Last Emperor.
According to Jie Zhang (Trinity University San Antonio), The Last Emperor and Chen represented China and the Chinese for Western eyes in the late 1980s: feminised, backward, and yet alluring and desirable. Her Hollywood career continued but as the exoticised woman, whatever ethnicity she played—including Vietnamese and Inuit. Even when Chen became a U.S. citizen in 1989, she could not play a typical American woman, including in Twin Peaks, where she’s cast as another manipulative migrant from Hong Kong.
While Hollywood embraced Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, Chen went in the opposite direction and directed Xiu Xiu, which revises her early films, causing it to be briefly banned in China. She directed her first Hollywood movie in 2000, Autumn in New York, but by the 21st century she had focused on acting in China.
Since the release of this book, Chen has performed on both sides of the Pacific: feature films in China, and streaming series in America. Despite her past hardships, she remains a bankable name in both countries.
Chow Yun-fat, meanwhile, represents the fate of Hong Kong. Raised on Lamma Island in a house without electricity, he took odd jobs in Kowloon and studied at the City University of Hong Kong before becoming a TVB trainee. John Woo made him the face of the “heroic bloodshed genre” of the late 1980s, at a time when Hong Kong was seen as the second most important city in Asia after Tokyo, if not as Tokyo’s evil twin. His persona as an honourable tough guy and a funny man was fused in God of Gamblers—now Hong Kong just flaunted its wealth and vice.
Off to Hollywood for the bitter truth. In both The Replacement Killers and The Corruptor, he plays gunmen who are bound by Triads in the Chinatown. His characters might cause trouble for America, but America has nothing to do with their troubles. Lin Feng (University of Leicester) states that like Hong Kong, his characters are eager to escape China, but America does not accept them either.
By the turn of the new millennium, he plays reformers and compromisers in Anna and the King, CTHD, and The Bulletproof Monk. He returned to Hong Kong, joined the new film industry, and became the face of Hong Kong’s authority, preaching loyalty and filial piety as Confucius, Jade Emperor, and even an orderly and conservative Cao Cao, the traditional antagonist of the Romance of Three Kingdoms saga.
Interestingly, despite his support for the 2014 Hong Kong protests (which happened after the publication of this book), his career remained secure and his From Vegas to Macau trilogy went ahead. Perhaps the Party needed Mr Hong Kong as much he needed the new Hong Kong.
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Happily, positive changes have happened ten years after this book’s publication, driven by two things. One is the growth of the Chinese film industry, which although is no longer aiming at international markets, performs strong domestically to the point that current Chinese and Hong Kong see no point in crossing the Pacific.
Secondly, the global spread of video streaming services, Asian as well as American, enable studios and stars to take on projects that otherwise wouldn’t do well in cinemas or on cable. Many East Asian classics are available on YouTube and taken on by American services like Netflix and Disney+, regional services, and Chinese apps like IQIYI and Tencent Video.
With so many options on services and cinemas, some stars could have their films revisted. Gone are the heavy expectations of the 2000s that the films must be successful, and the star must represent Asia well; and any missed release might be caught on streaming at your convenience.
Zhang Ziyi, for example, who had a tough 2000s on both sides of the Pacific, starred in Hollywood sci-fi films The Cloverfield Paradox and Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the late 2010s while also working in China. No more tough critics about her on the films’ quality and box office performances, and no more accusations of misrepresenting China. The audience might have too many films to see and too many film stars to scrutinise.
Some Hollywood stars like Natalie Portman, Ana de Armas, and Regé-Jean Page are sceptical about the relevance of film stars and see the bright side that audiences can now appreciate art, and now it’s a quite level playing field for actors and crews.
On the other hand, we see that stars remain relevant, whatever country you’re in. In fact, we live in a time where mature women like Michelle Yeoh, Cate Blanchett, and Olivia Colman prove to be the centre of the buzz, in regardless of the type of film.
The spectacles had their moment, but the search bar, still unthinkable when East Asia Film Stars was released ten years ago, will accept queries on the names of the film stars and where you can watch them.
How to cite: Rustan, Mario. “Stardom Before Netflix: A Review of East Asian Film Stars.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Mar. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/03/02/east-asian-film-stars.
Mario Rustan is a writer and reviewer living in Bandung, Indonesia. [All contributions by Mario Rustan.]