East Asian Film Stars

L. Wing-Fai, A. Willis, L. Wing-Fai, A. Willis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137029188
• eBook ISBN: 9781137029195
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

Many stars from China, Japan and Korea are the most popular and instantly recognizable in the world. East Asian Film Stars brings together some of the world's leading cinema scholars to offer their insights into the work of regional and transnational screen legends, contemporary superstars and mysterious cult personas.

Part I

Markets and Reception

1

Body of Action, Face of Authenticity: Symbolic Stars in the Transnational Marketing and Reception of East Asian Cinema

Daniel Martin

The achievements of East Asian cinema on the international stage in recent years reveal a multitude of approaches to marketing and a variety of critical discourses. Genre, Auteurism, and Orientalism have all played a key role in promoting potentially unfamiliar films to a new audience eager for something different. Stardom, too, has been a key factor. The globalization of cinema has led to the emergence of transnational stars, creating iconic personae that transcend national boundaries. However, East Asian stars rarely have fixed, stable, universal personae; their significance in the domestic context is often quite different to how they are perceived internationally. Furthermore, these international star personae are often constructed by distributors for specific marketing purposes, serving to create meaning and context as required. These new star images, then, may have little to connect them to the actual actor’s screen persona; they operate as signs and symbols, as brands, as rhetorical instruments to frame promotion and consumption. Thus, the inherent flexibility of the star’s image takes on a further dimension, as specific actors incorporate different meanings within new contexts, all under the broad auspices of appealing to a foreign audience.

This chapter will examine the way star images have been constructed as both flexible, signifying vastly different concepts in varied contexts, and rigid, symbolic of a fixed idea and emblematic of entire genres and national cinemas. There are several dimensions to these star identities: genre, nationality, critical reception and the marketing activities of distributors. These are not independent but interdependent: the way stars are promoted affects their reception, how they are celebrated affects their personae, the genres they associate with inform their promotion. Furthermore, these discourses are not necessarily harmonious, with promotional materials often framing a star in a very different way to critics and fans. The genres and national cinemas under consideration all fall broadly within the cycle of transnational East Asian cinema that began with the mainstream success in the West of Ang Lee’s US/Chinese hybrid Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/Wohu canglong in 2000 and peaked with the ‘Asia Extreme’ cycle of film distribution around five years later: the new Hong Kong crime film cycle, transformed from its earlier ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ mode into something (supposedly) more cerebral and sophisticated; the swordplay genre represented by the Chinese wuxia epic and its South Korean equivalent, the muhyeop film; and the Korean revenge thriller, epitomized by the widely celebrated Oldboy/Oldeuboi (Park Chan-wook, 2003).

These are distinct genres, yet they often share an audience and a marketing discourse, and the role of stars in the high visibility achieved by these films is telling. By associating stars with specific genres, the presence of a star image becomes a familiarizing hook on which distributors can base a marketing campaign and around which audiences and critics create generic expectations of the film in question. Yet the marketing and consumption of an East Asian genre film in the West can sometimes find itself in a star vacuum if the domestic marketing materials, or even the textual pleasures of the film itself are based around a star who remains anonymous to the transnational audience. In these cases, a rare solution is for a Hollywood figure to act as star, providing a framework of generic associations and implications of quality, undermining and potentially overwriting the national signifiers and authorial aspects of the original text.

This chapter will therefore examine this instrumental use of stars in both the marketing and reception of East Asian cinema in the UK and the USA. Drawing on specific examples of films from Hong Kong, Mainland China and South Korea, the strategies applied in the creation of posters and other promotional materials, as well as reviews and other critical discourses, will be analysed. In particular, the star images of Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi, and American director Quentin Tarantino over recent years will be charted. All three figures were central in the marketing and critical reception of several high-profile releases, and the way their images were used to connote genre, nationality, authorship and authenticity demonstrates the varied approach to using stardom transnationally. This chapter seeks to account for the rapid construction of star images in East Asian cinema by examining those star personae invented by Western critics and distributors that ultimately recreate the star as a market-specific brand.

The flexible star image: Tony Leung

The revived fortunes of the Hong Kong crime genre owe a great deal to Infernal Affairs/Wu jian dao, the 2002 film co-directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. Infernal Affairs marked a breakthrough for the domestic industry’s recovery from its post-1997 decline, and for the global visibility of Hong Kong cinema (Leung 2008, 77; Marchetti 2007, 3). Hong Kong cinema, long defined by the action excesses of kung fu and ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ gunplay, entered a new phase with Infernal Affairs, and was celebrated for its supposedly sophisticated sense of restraint and emphasis on psychology and the political landscape of Hong Kong under Chinese rule.

The film’s chief strengths, then, are its complex plot and richly drawn characters, and central to the film’s thematic exploration of morality and identity are its leading performances from Andy Lau and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. In particular, Leung is undoubtedly one of the most successful and widely acclaimed Hong Kong actors of his generation, with a broad and diverse filmography. In addition to the numerous awards bestowed upon him by the domestic industry, he has achieved recognition internationally, most notably by winning the award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 with In the Mood for Love/Huayang nianhua (Wong Kar-wai). Leung’s prestigious reputation and diverse experience proved to be vital to both the marketing and critical reception of Infernal Affairs in the UK. Leung came to represent Infernal Affairs both as an example of the new sophistication of Hong Kong cinema and as a sign of the film’s fundamental connections to the violent ‘bullet ballets’ of the earlier action film cycle.

In the UK, Infernal Affairs was released during a cycle of film distribution spearheaded by Tartan Films’ Asia Extreme brand. This was a notably successful attempt to draw East Asian cinema into the mainstream, while retaining the ‘forbidden’ associations that appeal to its usual niche audience (Dew 2007; Shin 2009). The Asia Extreme brand involved eliding the national differences between films from Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Hong Kong and marketing them on a highly Orientalist basis, promising more excessive and immoral scenes of sex and violence than Western cinema could possibly offer. Yet by reviewing and canonizing Infernal Affairs as an intelligent, subtle and credible thriller, rather than as an exploitative action film, critics were able to react against the perceived base pleasures of the Asia Extreme cycle and express their more sophisticated taste in cinema. The film’s reception, therefore, was at odds with the marketing and promotional discourse.

Thus, a major argument constructed by British critics in order to praise the film was that it surpassed previous Hong Kong action films and police thrillers through its intelligence and restrained treatment of violence. Wendy Ide, reviewing the film in The Times newspaper, noted that ‘this Hong Kong cop thriller is a cut above the usual bullet-riddled Asian action fare […] it has a complexity and depth of characterisation that helps the appeal extend further than the stunts and gun fights’ (2004a, 10). Kim Newman, writing for Sight and Sound magazine, agreed, suggesting that ‘traditionally, Hong Kong cop-gangster films have been fast and loose, intent on spectacle rather than suspense […] This is very different’ (2004, 47). A discussion of Infernal Affairs in Film Review magazine makes a similar observation and detects a conscious move on the part of the film-makers to depart from traditional populist Hong Kong genre styles, arguing that the film’s favouring of plotting and dialogue is unusual ‘given its country of origin’ (Mottram 2004, 100). These comments are typical of the consensus that emerged among critics seeking to demonstrate the film’s (and their own) credibility.

Perhaps the most important rhetorical tool used by critics to confer merit and meaning on Infernal Affairs, and distance the film from the more commercial and exploitative notions of Hong Kong cinema, was an emphasis on the importance and artistry of Tony Leung’s performance. Leung went to the UK to participate in press interviews to promote Infernal Affairs, and his associations with Hong Kong art cinema were essential to opening up a new reading strategy of the film. Critics lavished praise on Leung with great enthusiasm and, interestingly, emphasized his physical attractiveness as a key aspect of his appeal. At least two critics in their reviews of Infernal Affairs called Leung a ‘heartthrob’ (Romney 2004, 9; Shoard 2004, 18), while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw praised the film as ‘elusive and complex’, primarily due to Leung’s performance and the ‘sensitive, dreamy, yearning quality’ of his face, making him ‘one of the most sympathetic, attractive presences in Asian cinema’ (2004, 14). Critics focused on Leung’s face rather than his body, and his ability to express quiet emotion through subtle gestures.

More specifically, Leung and, by association Infernal Affairs, was associated with art cinema through the actor’s well-known collaborative relationship with the critically celebrated and much-loved arthouse director Wong Kar-wai; this proved to almost entirely define his identity in British newspaper articles. So, in a lengthy interview with Leung, written for The Sunday Times, it is suggested that ‘Leung belongs to Wong’, a ‘brilliant and febrile auteur’ (Gilbey 2004, 15). The article refers to all of Leung’s collaborations with Wong: Days of Being Wild/Ah Fei zhengzhuan (1991), Chungking Express/Chongqing senlin (1994), Happy Together/ Chunguang zhaxie (1997), In the Mood for Love and the thenforthcoming 2046 (2004). These are among the most internationally accessible and critically acclaimed Hong Kong films of all time, and have all received arthouse cinema exhibition in the UK. Gilbey, emphasizing both Leung’s and, by association Infernal Affairs’, seriousness and artistic credentials, prominently quotes Leung as saying: ‘I’m not a superstar. I’m an actor’ (2004, 15).

A feature article on Leung for The Guardian makes a similar distinction, and canonizes Infernal Affairs as art rather than action when critic Steve Rose notes that Leung is an actor who utilized his intellect and talent rather than physicality, suggesting that

Traditionally, Hong Kong cinema has exported martial-arts skills, tough-guy personas and the ability to leap from tall buildings in a single take – but its actors are only rarely in demand for their acting. When it comes to standing still and giving a dramatic performance, Tony Leung Chiu-wai is practically the only name on the list.

(Rose 2004, 11)

These comments draw a clear line between the older ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ cycle – epitomized by the work of John Woo and clearly out of critical favour in the UK in 2004 – and the more recent cycle, positioning Leung as a ‘new’ kind of Hong Kong performer, and Infernal Affairs as a film offering a ‘new’ kind of spectacle: intellectual, rather than kinetic. However, what these comments ignore – either as a result of a deliberate critical strategy or simple unawareness – is Leung’s considerable association with the exact cycle of action cinema being dismissed. Indeed, Leung has starring roles in two of John Woo’s best known action films: the critically acclaimed Bullet in the Head/Diexue jietou (1990) and the seminal Hard Boiled/Lashou shentan (1992), both of which were widely available on VHS, and later on DVD in the UK. Leung’s flexibility as an actor is shown in the variety of his past performances, which include the lighthearted comedy action film Tokyo Raiders/Dongjing gonglue (Jingle Ma, 2000), which has also been available in the UK since before the release of Infernal Affairs. That these critics – even in writing lengthy profiles of Leung as part of interview feature articles published in 2004 – almost without exception ignore Leung’s action film experience confirms that his star persona is used here purely rhetorically, to present a sense of distinction and a hierarchy of taste that privileges one film genre and dismisses another.

Yet, while it serves the critical discourse to position Leung as an actor rather than as a star, as a thinker rather than a fighter, the marketing of Infernal Affairs as an Asia Extreme-branded DVD release reveals a contrary strategy. On the UK DVD cover for the film, Leung is credited, not for any of his collaborations with Wong Kar-fai, but as the actor best known for Woo’s Hard Boiled. Likewise, the cover credits co-star Andy Lau for his role in the hyperbolic action film Fulltime Killer/Quanzhi shashou (Johnnie To, 2001), and thus Infernal Affairs now seems to fit neatly in the canon of ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ cinema and is intended to appeal to potential audiences on that basis.

The construction of Tony Leung’s star image, even in the single case of how Infernal Affairs was promoted and received in the UK, reveals both variety and flexibility. The period during which the film was released and Leung visited the UK for his press junket was a complex moment. Competing, yet sometimes complementary notions of Hong Kong cinema were part of the critical discourse, giving rise to the question: is this action of a specifically Oriental nature, harkening back to the explosive appeal of the late 1980s, or is this a newly cerebral cinema, more meaningful and artistic than the action films that came before? Leung is represented by critics in ways that reveal a clear hierarchy; he surpasses the physical nature of other Hong Kong actors – seen, apparently, as little more than daring stuntmen – by internalizing his performances and remaining physically static. Leung is also treated as a more credible performer because his international profile is based on the festival success of his work with Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai. Leung did not take the path of Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li by pursuing the supposedly crass commercial cinema offered by a Hollywood career.

Andrew Britton has noted that stars can be used as part of a process of ‘deploying one genre to resolve or soften tensions exacerbated by another’ (1991, 204), and the case of Leung and Infernal Affairs reveals precisely that; his credibility allowed critics to convince their readers (and themselves) that the film departed from ‘simple’ action film tropes and offered something of greater cultural value. These assumptions are predicated on value judgements about the fundamental respectability of foreign language art cinema and the inherent superficiality of commercial action film. Critics, in their desire to express a sens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Star Power from Hollywood to East Asia
• Part I: Markets and Reception
• Part II: Regional and Global Stars
• Part III: Stardom and Stars: From the Past
• Index