Brigitte Lin brings feeling to martial-arts roles and a welcome hardness to romance. We rate her ability to make such heightened characters matter, even when a film gives its easier pleasures to somebody else.
Fi1m perspective
In Chungking Express (1994), Brigitte Lin's woman in a blonde wig gives the romantic wandering a harder edge. The lonely policemen can be funny and faintly ridiculous; her presence makes their self-absorption feel less like the only thing happening in Hong Kong. We value that difference. Wong Kar-wai makes their embarrassment part of the pleasure of watching them, but Lin offers a useful change of tone. She need not be the most immediately engaging person in the film to improve it.
Her career began in Taiwanese romantic drama with Outside the Window (1973), before the move into Hong Kong cinema from 1983. Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) marks the turn towards genre work, with Peking Opera Blues (1986) and Swordsman II (1992) among the important films that followed. Working with directors including Tsui Hark, she took on action and androgynous roles, notably the cult leader Dongfang Bubai in Swordsman II. The early romances could be formulaic, but her ability to convey romantic innocence remained useful when the parts became fiercer. Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time (1994), with its dual-gender roles, offers another way into this side of her work.
Chungking Express gives her a busy city to contend with. Cinematographers Andrew Lau Wai-Keung and Christopher Doyle use handheld images and bold colour to keep Hong Kong moving around the characters. We were more moved than we expected by the policemen's loneliness, because those crowded streets made it look so ordinary. Against that, Lin's severity is welcome: another wistful performance would make the company less varied. The film benefits from having someone who brings a harder feeling into its romantic scenes, rather than simply adding another version of the same unhappiness.
Wong also gives Lin useful competition: Faye Wong's playful performance makes the second story the more engaging one. That is worth saying, because an appreciation of Lin need not pretend that she is the chief attraction here. There are stretches when the music and colour do more work than the scenes deserve, and no performance quite solves that. Even so, the cast makes the wandering worth following. Start with Chungking Express, then try Swordsman II for the action roles that became such an important part of her work.
Biography
Brigitte Lin is a Taiwanese actress. Born on 3 November 1954 in Sanchong, Taipei County, she was discovered on the streets of Taipei in 1972 and made her film debut in the 1973 adaptation of Outside the Window. She appeared in numerous Taiwanese romance films during the 1970s before moving to Hong Kong cinema.
In Hong Kong she took on a range of roles, including in Police Story (1985), Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983), New Dragon Gate Inn (1992), The Bride with White Hair (1993) and Ashes of Time (1994). She retired from acting following her marriage to businessman Michael Ying in 1994. In 2023 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Horse Awards.
