The smooth-talking playboy cha-cha-chas before a full-length mirror with the aplomb of Travolta, fully aware of his magnificence, yet so offhand about it, like the puff of cigarette smoke he tosses out. Roaming the neon streets of swinging sixties Hong Kong, he loves them and leaves them, catty prostitute and good-hearted girl alike. Elusive, wounded, irresistible, he is paragon and paradigm, little boy lost from a lost era, swinging with easy samba rhythm but forever pining for a mother he never knew. This is Ah-Fei, the star of Wong Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990). Your masterpiece. You are Ah-Fei and Ah-Fei is you. By now your reputation has already been cemented: everyone recognizes you as the temperamental artiste, the perfectionist, the man who stalks the roads of what the Japanese call the Floating World — the domain where art and transience and death collide — without a glimmer of hesitation. And roads inevitably trail off to beautiful endings: mortally wounded, Ah-Fei rides a train deep into the Philippine jungle, straight to the lush Heart of Darkness, rootless and unrepentant, his hair artfully swept over his brow as he smiles his final pained smile.

Not far behind is international acclaim with Farewell My Concubine — not so much your best performance as your most quintessential, running from haughty to outraged to devastated to redeemed, the chronicle of a beautiful life in an ugly time. You are not one for naturalism. You revel in outsize gestures and quiet charisma, you know when to play it as soft as a stage whisper or emote to the rafters. In the role of a temperamental gay Peking Opera singer suffering through a century’s upheaval, you finally come upon a canvas both broad and intimate enough to support you. Writhing in the throes of opium addiction, gazing sadly from behind thick-rimmed glasses, throwing on a cloak like the Belle of the Ball — the rest is history.

You have moved past Hong Kong, into the arms of the world. With Concubine’s fame comes fresh gossip: tales of nervous breakdowns, of seeing "ghosts," of dark depression, of moving to Vancouver, of retiring from the music business permanently. Still you soldier on, ever playing the sophisticate, charming and bratty. Jackie Chan may be pegged as Hong Kong’s good-natured ambassador to the world, Chow Yun-Fat the new action king, but you are Hong Kong’s dark prince, its Phantom of the Opera.

* * *

How to follow up on Farewell My Concubine, Days of Being Wild and the rest? The easy answer: it is impossible. The Phantom Lover (1995) shoulda been a contender: Leslie as a Chinese Phantom of the Opera, a can’t-miss scenario! Alas, you are dwarfed by ornate production design and faulty chemistry with leading lady Wu Chien-Lien (Eat, Drink, Man, Woman). Temptress Moon (1996) is another grand blunder. You are reunited with Concubine director Chen Kaige and star Gong Li in a winning formula: once again you are the youthful Lothario in a faraway time — in this case, 1930s Shanghai — tripped up by love and its slimy secrets. Preening one moment and anguished the next, you bravely push your performance to the edge of parody, but the film itself is wobbly, oblique, overdone.

Yet there is still a final gasp: 1997’s Happy Together, your last truly essential film, another collaboration with Wong Kar-Wai. The funhouse mirror image of Days of Being Wild, it abandons nostalgia for jet lag as you flit between modern-day Argentina, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Where your Ah-Fei was purposeful, languid, doomed, your openly gay character in Happy is rambunctious, toxic, helpless, the perfect boy toy for Tony Leung Chiu Wai (Hard-Boiled). At film’s beginning Tony takes you from behind; by film’s end you are beaten and bruised, surrendering to his ministrations. We are witnessing an exchange of ascendancy as well as body fluids, as Tony will assume your mantle of sensitive leading man. Less protean, more contemplative and dog-eyed soulful, he is the ideal embodiment of Hong Kong as it faces its End of Days. His recent roles in movies — adulterer, farcical yet romantic hero, tortured undercover cop, philosophical swordsman — all echo prime characters from your past, minus your canny look-at-me flamboyance and self-possession.

* * *

The economy has crashed, the political freedoms have diminished, the movie industry has declined. Hong Kong has moved on. You are old school, old hat, old news, a reminder of decadences no longer affordable or wanted. You still pack them in at concerts, but former comrades John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat have fled for Hollywood; directors Chen Kaige and Wong Kar Wai are no longer calling. Your post-Happy film career reads like an opium haze. In Double Tap (1999), you are a gun-toting psycho: nine parts mope and one part drama queen breakdown. In the To Catch a Thief-wannabe Okinawa Rendezvous (2000), given the opportunity to play off the likes of Faye Wong (Chungking Express) and Tony Leung Ka-Fai (The Lover), you sleepwalk. On and on, we hear reports of your depressions, your temper tantrums on set. Once Mercury, you are now the tired harridan.

And thus two empty years pass after Okinawa, as tabloids scream tales of permanent retirement, rocky times with your partner Daffy Tong — for you have officially come out, and even though everyone knew the truth, the mystery has vanished. But you have one last regeneration up your perfumed sleeve: a new album, a wildly successful concert tour, and a Sixth Sense ripoff, Inner Senses (2002), in which you find a new direction. You play a grounded, mature psychologist — rich irony for a man who breathed life into characters who would flee screaming from self-examination. And yet, in the modulations of your performance, we see the old Leslie, uncertain of living, haunted by ghosts — it is always ghosts with you, for a man out of time and step with the world is mere inches from being a ghost himself. The film concludes with you perched on a rooftop, driven to insanity, ready to jump. In the world of film and happy endings, you are granted a reprieve — a woman who loves you, faith dragging you from the brink. A heartfelt embrace, another dawn, another syrupy love song.

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