We remember and celebrate Cheng Pei-pei and her extraordinary life.
Anyone who has gone through a journey of systematically planning a watchlist of films has tweaked a filter system that gets progressively stricter. With so many films to watch, any metric that allows a filmgoer to predict quality to any degree of success is an essential tool.
I started with actors. I noticed certain actors must have an affinity towards better films. In reality, most likely had an agent with a great eye for projects or were themselves very selective.
This metric worked well enough at the start of my journey through film, though I found it hard to maintain consistency in my watching habits. The dissonance from watching wildly different movies in a sequence that didn’t follow a pattern over time, or lacking thematic relevance felt underwhelming.
And so, I eventually found directors to be a more effective metric to resolve the issue of curating a watchlist that made sense but was also stimulating over time – an oeuvre of work is more suitable to analysis.
That being said, I have found a very rare exception. Perhaps even a loophole. There are, in fact, certain actors who have a prodigious body of work that can be enjoyed without regard to chronology or intention. Not because of their selection of roles or any partnerships with directors.
There are a select few actors that break the rule by heightening a film’s enjoyability with their presence alone. In this case, they aren’t correlated with a film’s probability of being rewarding – they are the difference.
In the West, for me, it was Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame that epitomised this rule of exceptions. Sure Mitchum had classics ranging from The Night of the Hunter to El Dorado, but more than that, his work made Five Card Studs or The Racket just as engrossing. Gloria Grahame could make any film worth watching.
In Chinese cinema, I turn to Ti Lung and Cheng Pei-Pei. Just seeing Ti Lung in a role is enough to make me grin manically. As with Cheng Pei-Pei, I stare at disbelief as I see someone on screen that feels vaguely familiar nearly all the time. It is hard to believe that the same person who played Golden Swallow in King Hu’s famous Come Drink With Me (1966), plays Miss Yun in Lo Wei’s The Shadow Whip (1971) and Maria in Mina Shun’s Meditation Park(2017).
If there are any two actresses I would love to read autobiographies for, it is Cheng Pei-Pei and Sylvia Chang. Two incredible lives so deeply connected with film that neither the person, nor film seem recognisable without them.
When I scrolled down the news in the past month to the headline that an iconic female actress had passed my heart sank when I saw the photo. For once, I knew it was Cheng Pei-Pei immediately. If the sobriety of a post-mortem photo is what it took for me to recognise her, I would rather her remain ever elusive in the characters she portrayed.
I had been informed that Cheng Pei-Pei has an autobiography that has yet to be translated into English. Until that day, and long after it, I will continue to revisit her films for the wonder that they instill.
