Tony Leung

It’s a good bet that a lot of gay movie fanatics first latched on to Tony Leung, now the No. 1 leading man in Chinese films, when they caught up with him in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, a milestone movie about gay lovers released in 1997 that has enjoyed a long shelf life in revivals and on video.   Anyone who wants to see what Leung’s been up to lately can find him in director John Woo’s extravagantly romanticized historical war epic Red Cliff, opening in San Francisco and Berkeley over the Thanksgiving holiday.

The film also marks the return of Woo, who made his name with Hong Kong gangster films, to Chinese turf after a long detour in Hollywood  (notably for Face/Off, with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta, and Mission: Impossible 2, with Tom Cruise).

Signature themes from Woo’s good ol’ gangster days, including male bonding and a wistful acceptance of defeat as an inevitable part of life, are revived in Red Cliff.  Co-star Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers) picks up the other end of the male-bonding thread, and very elegantly, too.  And for the women, there is a warrior princess.

The epic, based on a classic Chinese novel, is set many hundreds of years ago, during the falling-apart of the Han dynasty.  Leung plays the head of feudal forces battling a usurper of the emperor’s throne, and Kaneshiro is his art-of-war strategist, sort of like Karl Rove to George Bush (an unfortunate comparison but you get the idea).

OK, make that sort of like Merlin to Lancelot.  That’s certainly a lot more poetic, which the film surely is – not altogether oddly. This is a war epic in which generals carve poetry in the sides of cliffs, a spy wraps a map of the enemy camp around herself like a garment, and a defensive maneuver is known as “the tortoise.’’

Red Cliff deals with a decisive battle, and even though it certainly has its share of mayhem and spurting blood (also Woo trademarks), it’s tempting to label the style “The Poetry of War.’’  Woo reminds us that accounts of ancient wars were told in the grand style by bards.  It goes beyond the The Strategist’s use of the language (the film is in Mandarin, with English subtitles), although Kaneshiro, waving a wing-like feathered fan, gives his metaphor-filled battle plans a distinctive spin.

The spy who goes behind enemy lines is the warrior princess in disguise, and she hands Woo an opportunity for one of his signature effects, the use of luminous white birds.  This time it is a white carrier pigeon in a beautifully conceived and executed aerial tracking shot through a classic breadloaf mountain landscape and over the enemy fleet in a river.

Woo’s imagery is of myth-making scale.  Spear-wielding attackers are blinded by the reflection from a suddenly turning phalanx of  shields.  The same shields are later formed into a movable shelter for the warriors beneath them.  Rapidly shifting formations of clouds are scrutinized for what strategic advantage may blow out of them.  One instance of outsmarting the enemy takes the form of an elaborate parody of the tea ceremony.  The finale is an operatic, close-up survey of the larger-than-life personalities that survive. 

Red Cliff opens Wednesday, Nov. 25, at the Embarcadero in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley.  It was originally shown in Asia in two parts, released separately, for a total running time of about five hours.  For the American release, the two parts were scrunched together and cut in half, coming in at about two and a half hours.  This condensed version has the advantage of unfolding in a straighter line, while losing something in character development.  One scene I remember from the longer version — which, sadly, is not included — involves the Tony Leung character getting an unexpected, late-night visit from an old friend.  He asks his wife to sleep elsewhere and invites the friend to share his bed (to spend the night talking, presumably).

For Happy Together, the unconventional director Wong Kar-wai dragged Leung, who is not gay, and Leslie Cheung, who was (he died leaping from a high-rise hotel in downtown Hong Kong) to Buenos Aires to play a pair of lovers on the verge of a break-up.  Leung was not thrilled to discover he would have a couple of nude scenes with Cheung.  Wong’s film-making habits at the time took some getting used to. He would make up the script on the spot each day for the next day’s shoot and figure out later if all that film he had piled up could be cut into a coherent movie.  It turned into a masterpiece.

Leung (Lust, Caution and In the Mood for Love) is not known as an action hero and anyway in his noble mode here still gets a couple of moments in Red Cliff to show off.  He’s got some surprisingly respectable wushu moves in sword practice and, in the thick of battle on horseback, pulls an enemy arrow from his shoulder and with a leap plunges it into his assailant.  Kaneshiro  remains a non-combatant scholar throughout.  The movie ends with a long-held, profile-to-profile double shot of him and Leung that is suitable for framing.