On April 1st, 2003 Hong Kong's Leslie Cheung killed himself. I'm off by a few days here, but on the fifth anniversary of his death I just wanted to say a little something because, along with Tony Leung and Lau Ching-wan, he was probably one of Hong Kong's best actors. Nowhere was this more clear than when I recently watched Wong Kar-wai's MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS.

To be honest, BLUEBERRY isn't really my bag. It'll probably get something of a pass because it's from Wong Kar-wai, but if it was from anyone else I would imagine it would be the kind of movie assigned to the lowest-ranked critics to review. There's Rachel Weisz in a really unkempt hairpiece screaming "I'm going to git me uh johbuh!" like someone on COPS right before the tasers hit. Jude Law is charming enough, and Cat Powers has an off-kilter appeal but the whole movie is supposed to revolve around Norah Jones and she hangs around this movie's neck like a corpse, dragging it down and making what should be all sweetness and lighter-than-air charm feel as heavy and joyless as a garage full of exhaust fumes. Wong Kar-wai has a lot of things he likes to do, but his movies seem to contain two basic kinds of scenes: there's the pop music moment when some unlikely hit appears on the soundtrack and creates a fragile, breakable moment of shimmering beauty, and then there's the extended close-up of his actors' faces. One is all movement and light, the other is all stillness and shadows. Norah Jones can't hold a close-up to save her life - there's just nothing going on, she comes across as blank as a blackboard, and so the movie never takes off.

So much of Wong Kar-wai's recent movies have consisted of close-ups of Tony Leung's face that I feel familiar with every hair on his straggly John Waters moustache. He gives good face, but he's becoming overly familiar to me, although you can't blame WKW for using him all the time: what other actor has a face like a star that can hold the camera like Tony? The only other one who could do it was Leslie Cheung.

The first time I saw ASHES OF TIME I was pretty much lost. It annoyed me, it irritated me, it bored me and it bugged the hell out of me. But the next day I came back to the late, great, sleazy old Rosemary theater and saw it again, and whereas the first time around I felt like I was in a room full of paintings of doors (pretentious! boring!) this time around all the doors were open and while some of them led to dead ends, some took me places that blew my mind. I'm glad I came back the second time, but what got me to do it was a simple shot with Leslie.

It's a medium close-up as he sits at a table and gives his hustler's come on to a potential customer, trying to tempt them into hiring one of his swordsmen. Isn't there someone they've hated enough to have killed, he asks? It's a simple little speech, and a nice piece of close-up acting, but the kicker comes at the end of the film when the exact same shot of Leslie delivering the exact same dialogue is repeated. It seems to be a different take of the same performance and suddenly Leslie comes across not as a small-time pimp for hired blades, but as a man who is disgusted with himself. His words are the same but this time around they taste like ashes and they sound like regret. It's a simple close-up, but it oozes a lifetime of self-loathing and it's an amazing piece of cinema.

It's a simple Kuleshov experiment where the same footage takes on different meaning depending on what we've just seen, which makes it even more impressive. All that information is in his face both times we see it, but after being put through the entire running time of the film we're looking for something different when we see his face again, and amazingly we find it. And that's why Leslie was the only other actor in a WKW film to get this many close-ups: even when he's happy and open, there's something dark and hidden, some slightly poisonous, in his look. In HAPPY TOGETHER you can tell that no matter how much he acts like a jerk, he always hates himself the most. And in DAYS OF BEING WILD his playboy would be completely unlikeable if you weren't able to see how self-destructive he is behind those eyes. It's hard to hate someone if they hate themselves more and that was Leslie's gift: the ability to make cads and cowards appealing because you could see it written on his face: underneath all the horrible behavior, he was his own worst enemy.

Watching Leslie in DAYS OF BEING WILD, ASHES OF TIME and HAPPY TOGETHER you wonder what would have happened if he had lived. Just as Wong Kar-wai was able to root out a dangerous, almost sadistic side to Tony Leung's personality over the course of their movies together, would he also have kept working with Leslie and eventually pulled out something less masochistic from the actor? I can't stand the embalmed 2046, but one of the best things about the movie is Leslie's presence, conspicuous by its absence. He's the invisible lover that Tony tries to become, the dead boyfriend that Carina Lau yearns for and if he had been alive when 2046 was being shot would he have appeared in the film? Just as Tony Leung was an enigmatic closing presence in DAYS OF BEING WILD, summoned for just the final three minutes of the film, would 2046 have ended with a mirror image of Leslie, suddenly appearing in the flesh for the last handful of minutes, one more door opening in that endlessly self-reflexive house of mirrors?

Watching MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS you realize how few actors there are that have the gravity to hold the close-ups that Wong Kar-wai likes linger over. In BLUEBERRY, lots of actors try and they all pretty much fail, except for David Strathairn but he has the advantage of age which can often equal character onscreen. But Leslie, as young as he looked, had a face that could suck the audience's attention into the screen like a black hole exerting such massive gravitational pull that it could bend time. I can count the actors capable of doing that on one hand and type at the same time. Five years after his death, Leslie's loss has left a hole that still can't be filled.