TAKESHI

It's Takeshi Kaneshiro's 51st birthday today, and I felt compelled to pay a small tribute to one of my favourite contemporary screen actors. Even now, watching him in Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), I believe he gave us two of the most charming and cool performances in modern cinema.

In Chungking Express, he plays Cop 223, who is obsessed with the expiry dates on canned pineapples, as well as human relationships. He ends up spending a (non-sexual) night with a mysterious female drug runner, played by Brigitte Lin, as their lives intersect momentarily before they return to their starkly different realities in Hong Kong. Kaneshiro's performance is hilarious, sensitive, and beautifully unselfconscious as he tries to heal from his recent heartbreak with his ex-girlfriend, May, who loves pineapples, all before reaching his 25th birthday.

Kaneshiro’s performance in Fallen Angels, a loose sequel to Chungking Express, finds him playing He Zhiwu, a deaf mute who breaks into small businesses at night and forces random strangers to pay for his services. One night, he might take over a hair salon; on another, he hijacks an ice cream van. His methods are aggressive and eccentric, owing to his limited ability to communicate. Despite this, He Zhiwu has a good heart, as seen in his close relationship with his father before he passes away.

The contrast between Kaneshiro's performances in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels really showcases his skill in creating two uniquely different characters in similar worlds. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he was born of dual cultural heritage, with a mother from Taipei and a father from Okinawa. When I first saw his performance in Fallen Angels in 1995, I didn’t even recognise it was the same actor—testament to his remarkable ability to shape-shift on screen.

Kaneshiro has often talked in interviews about how equally challenging and rewarding it was for him to work with Wong Kar-Wai as a young actor. This was partly due to the fact that Kar-Wai was known (at that time) for shooting without a script and for encouraging actors to improvise and develop their characters independently. This unique process unlocked a certain amount of fear and inhibition inside Kaneshiro and forced him to be truly present in each scene while learning to implictly trust his director's vision.

Of course, Takeshi has starred in many other classic films, such as House of Flying Daggers (2004), Red Cliff (2008), and Perhaps Love (2005), but it’s for his two iconic performances in Wong Kar Wai's 1990s Hong Kong cinematic duo of Chungking Express and Fallen Angels that I return to most often to appreciate his unique talent.

And of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention (as I've bored many of you with before) one of my all-time favorite movie endings: the finale of Fallen Angels, where the talents of Takeshi Kaneshiro, Michelle Reis, Wong Kar Wai, and The Flying Pickets come together to create a scene of poetic nocturnal perfection.