Hidden tiger

Hero isn’t just a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon lookalike. It outboxes Ang Lee’s sophisticated international hit in a visceral rush, with jaw-dropping fight sequences and extravagant visuals. It is set 2,000 years ago in a divided China, and features Cheung as a deadly assassin, Flying Snow, one of three hired to kill the ruler of the Qin dynasty. She becomes embroiled in a tragic love affair with her fellow killer, played by Leung. The structure is surprisingly complex, viewing the same events from different perspectives, which Zhang helpfully colour-codes in ravishing washes of primary tints. Within this ultra-stylised packaging, though, emotions run raw and high. “Zhang likes women crying — a lot,” Cheung laughs. “I asked him, ‘Why am I always crying? Flying Snow shouldn’t cry all the time: she’s tough.’ But he said, ‘No, a woman crying on screen is the best thing an audience can watch.’” Both modest and self-critical, Cheung says of her work: “I was a bit disappointed with myself — but I always am.”

A needless admission. Her work in Hero can mean only one thing: a Hollywood summons. Yet while one came for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger star Michelle Yeoh, who has also played a robust Bond babe, Cheung defiantly explains that she’s not planning to follow her onto the LA merry-go-round. “The whole Hollywood system doesn’t appeal to me very much,” she states, with typical bluntness, in her perfect English. “Why does one want to go there? Fame, money, big projects, your own trailer? I don’t know. Other than that, just for the movies themselves, it’s not that appealing.”

Cheung turns 40 tomorrow, and may secretly feel that her moment in an industry that recognises beauty before talent has passed. That said, she still looks like the girl who came second in a Miss Hong Kong pageant two decades ago. She is wearing a red floral-patterned skirt, a low-cut black top and a sleeveless denim jacket, and her slim arms are adorned with silver bangles. Her shoulder-length dark hair is pulled back tight, revealing her petite round face. The bios say she is 5ft 6in, but she seems much taller, her athletic figure — or perhaps her forceful personality — lending her extra height.

She brings all this to the screen. When she is not demonstrating her feline agility, she is a mass of contradictions. The exterior is graceful and placid, but inside a fire rages. Take her signature role in In the Mood for Love, in which she and Leung beautifully play out the briefest of encounters. Cheung’s external stillness demonstrates just how she is able to convey a range of tamped-down emotions with the merest of movements — a dip of the head, a sashay of the hips. She and Leung also signed up for a sequel, 2046, which the perfectionist Wong has spent five years shooting and reshooting, editing and re-editing. It was the most anticipated film at last month’s Edinburgh festival, but Wong withdrew it at the last minute.

For the most part, however, following her work with Jackie Chan in the Police Story trilogy, Asian audiences have wanted to see Cheung kicking and

punching her way to oblivion. She is more than aware of this. Her intro- duction to western audiences, via Assayas’s 1996 film Irma Vep, in which she plays an action star who comes to work in France, held up a mirror to her real life.

“It was important for me that I made the film,” she says, in between sips of herbal tea.

“To have that experience of being in Paris and meeting Olivier, and what came after that — it made a bridge for people to know me.”

Cheung embarked on a relationship with Assayas, marrying him in December 1998. They divorced three years later (Cheung is now unattached), but have remained on friendly terms, their collaboration on Clean being the proof. “We’d always thought of doing another film together, but during our marriage, I really didn’t want to,” she says. “I thought it didn’t feel normal. Then, one day, he said, ‘I have a subject for us — another film together.

’ Because he wrote it for me, I just didn’t have a doubt. I just knew I wanted to be there for him.” In Clean, she plays a washed-up rock singer whose musician lover dies of an overdose. Attempting to kick her own drug habit, she is determined to reconnect with her young son, who blames her for his father’s death. Despite stumbling over Assayas’s clumsy English dialogue at times, Cheung offers a gutsy turn that even sees her belt out a tune at the end.

The day before, when I met Assayas, he told me he feels his ex-wife is “torn” between two cultures. Even though she divides her time between Hong Kong, Paris and “the airplane”, Cheung thinks his choice of word is too strong. “There are days when I feel torn, but it’s not every day. There are days when I feel lucky to be in these two worlds. I get the best of both. But, yes, I’m between the two. I’m very Chinese, but I have some westernised thinking. It doesn’t work in Asia, and my friends don’t understand me.” About what? She lets out a strange gurgle as she thinks. “To make a film with your ex-husband,” she finally says.

Cheung’s westernisation took place in the unlikely setting of Kent, where her family moved, when she was eight, from Hong Kong. Her father worked for a printing company there — “not a Chinese restaurant” — and acting was not her parents’ first career choice for her. “My mum watched films, and she took me to see The Sound of Music when I was a child,” she says, “but she did not have a love for cinema.” At first, Cheung wanted to be a hairdresser. “My mother was against it. She didn’t want me to be an actress, either — she thought I wasn’t going to make any money. An actress, a designer, a hairdresser, was not right for her, not practical. She wanted me to choose between being a lawyer or a doctor.”

It was not long before she was proving her mother wrong. Returning to Hong Kong when she was 17, she took up modelling, even appearing in Miss World. Then, after winning a television contract, she was spotted by Jackie Chan, who wanted her to play May in Police Story, the 1985 film that shot her to stardom and spawned two sequels.

Seventy-five films later, most of them for the insatiable Asian market, she has just begun to slow down.

Some might blame Wong, who first cast her in his 1988 film As Tears Go By, before reuniting with her for Ashes of Time and In the Mood for Love. It was during the latter that she admits she “lost the joy of (being) an actress”. She felt stifled, unable to contribute creatively to the development of her character. “With Wong, it’s hard to have that, and at some point I really blamed him for taking away my pleasure of being an actress — but then you see the film and you forgive him everything.” Her testy relationship with the director continued into 2046. The cut I saw in Cannes is a beautiful, mysterious beast, with a masterpiece buried somewhere inside it. Cheung’s experience was no less frustrating. Told to make herself available last summer, she cancelled her holiday, only to find her director was not ready to shoot. “He didn’t have the set, he didn’t have the clothes — then it was the beginning of October, when I had to go to shoot Clean, and by that time he was ready.” Faye Wong took over her role, though Cheung can still be glimpsed in the film.

If Cheung’s patience with the business of acting is wearing thin, it might be because her biological clock is ticking. “I don’t think I’ll ever give up the idea of being a mother until it’s really too late,” she says. “I love children, and I would like to experience being with a child all the time. But another side of me says, ‘No, don’t do it.’ I have many girlfriends, and I’m one of the last who’s not a mother. Some cope well; with others, you see the nightmare that they have, the constant struggle every day. You cannot veer a minute from the schedule, the pattern. And I’m someone who is quite scared of patterns in life.” As Cheung knows, sometimes, it’s safer to get on that plane and fly away.

Hero opens on Friday; 2046 and Clean will be released next year

Don’t miss the trailer for Hero on September’s The Month CD-Rom