CENTER STAGE (Yuen Ling-yuk) A
aka: ACTRESS (Ruan
Lingyu) d: Stanley Kwan
Hong Kong (126
mi) 1992 extended version: (154 mi) edited version: (118 mi)
Uniquely original follow-up to Kwan’s sumptuously beautiful
ghost story Rouge
(Yan zhi kou) (1988), though the ghost in this story is legendary Silent
era film star Ruan Lingyu, a huge star of Shanghai cinema, still appearing in
silent films as late as 1935, often compared to Greta Garbo and Lillian Gish
for her suffering heroines, yet her life took a tragic turn, taking her own
life at the peak of her acclaim on International Woman’s Day at the age of 24. Kwan’s film intermixes vintage photos and film
clips with a modern era retelling of her story, using Kwan himself front and
center in front of a cinema vérité style camera discussing her life with his
film crew, openly commenting offering contemporary views of the people they are
portraying, starring the illustrious Maggie Cheung as an actress in the role of
Ruan Lingyu, performing in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Shanghainese fluently,
switching languages with ease. Using
black and white stills of the silent era actress to open the film, Kwan then
reimagines the behind-the-scenes production of many of Ruan’s major films,
juxtaposing these reconstructed scenes shot in color with corresponding black
and white clips from the original films, creating a mirror effect with a dual
reality transitioning from the past to present.
Curiously, Kwan includes films that have been lost, so his film crew,
led by cinematographer Poon Hang-sang, are reconstructing scenes that no longer
exist. Openly staging what we see in
front of cameras and microphones gives the film a documentary feel, paying
particular attention to historic detail in the fictionalized recreation, with
Kwan speaking to colleagues or people in the industry to recount what they
remember about the screen legend. In
this unique way, a story is told not only about a legendary film star, famous
for her roles in tales of harassed and martyred women (mirroring her own life),
yet molding herself in the spirit of revolution and resistance against foreign
powers, while facing the uncertainty of romantic love herself, adopting a
daughter “for protection” during a particularly unstable relationship,
struggling to assert her individuality against a stiflingly repressive
patriarchal industry, finding herself trapped by hostile forces that ultimately
destroy her, but it also paints a picture of cinema itself, revealing the inner
workings of a close-knit movie set, emphasizing teamwork and camaraderie, showing
how they discuss and collaborate before ever pointing the camera at anyone. Cheung is magnificent in the role, winning
Best Actress when it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1992, becoming
the first Chinese actress to be recognized with a European award. Despite its success in Berlin, the film was
an unmitigated disaster in Hong Kong, premiering at a Jackie Chan Foundation
event with massive walk-outs, leading to major cuts by the local distributor
who didn’t bother to preserve the original negative. Saved by the Sydney Film Festival, who kept a
full-length print, a DVD could be made using the original full-length version (the
edited version is a hack job, chopping off more than 30-minutes). The film begins in 1929, the year the Lianhua Film Company opened in Shanghai with a
progressive left-wing mentality, providing inspirational social messages, with
a voiceover claiming Ruan was only interested in serious roles, cutting to the
present, with Kwan himself commenting on Ruan dying at the height of her glory,
questioning how Maggie Cheung might feel doing the same, while asking how she’d
like to be remembered. Her measured
response takes into consideration acts of desperation, which is presumably how
Ruan felt at the time of her death, hounded and harassed by gossip and salacious
tabloid reporters delving into her private life, much of it politically
motivated by nationalist Kuomintang elements to undermine the film industry’s
progressive social message, perhaps manipulating reactionary public sentiment
following the early 1930’s Japanese invasion of Manchuria, occupying and
establishing a puppet state, actually disrupting Ruan’s work with Lianhua
Studios, with Shanghai eventually falling to the Japanese just a few years
after Ruan’s death, so by 1938 the Chinese film industry moved from Shanghai to
Hong Kong.
Coming from a working class background, Ruan began acting at
the age of 16, establishing a wide range of roles from comedic to tragic,
portraying prostitutes, teachers, and revolutionary workers, where nearly all prints
of her early 20’s and 30’s films are lost, so Kwan juxtaposes archival still
photos with Maggie Cheung recreating the role in Sun Yu’s WAYSIDE FLOWERS (1930)
where Ruan Lingyu plays a mother desperately driven by famine to feed her
starving baby in the snow with blood from her own finger that she has bitten, receiving
instructions from the director, doing several takes, the last one compared to
another Ruan performance from THE GODDESS (1934), a later film that has
survived. The film is a curious blend of
history using two women born in different cities, as Ruan was born in Shanghai,
while Cheung was born in British-ruled Hong Kong. Ruan’s life is viewed from the vantage point
of two different men, one who remained openly jealous and emotionally naïve, never
really developing a happy relationship, and another with a more mature and
financially successful man that allowed their love to thrive, if only for a
brief period. At the age of 16, Ruan’s
mother worked as a housemaid for a wealthy Zhang family, with Ruan developing a
relationship with Zhang Damin (Lawrence Ng), a chronic gambler and spendthrift
who never proposed, quickly tiring of his irresponsible behavior, splitting
from him in 1933. His ways were so
intolerable that he was eventually thrown out of his own family in disgrace,
living on a stipend from the actress herself, who falls madly in love with a
rich tea merchant, Tang Jishang (Han Chin), who not only had a wife (living
separately), but a history of affairs.
Despite a separation agreement in civil court where Zhang demands
alimony, he remains humiliated and embittered by the circumstances, filing a headlines-grabbing
lawsuit against Ruan for living in adultery, attempting to extort even more
money out of her while being paid handsomely by the tabloids for offering his
story of living with her. Ruan was the
leading actress in several left-wing films of the 30’s, including THREE MODERN
WOMEN (1933), NIGHT IN THE CITY (1933), THE GODDESS (1934), and NEW WOMEN
(1934), films contrasting motherhood with prostitution, with suggestions that
mothers will resort to anything to help benefit their children, where malicious
rumors began flying with the making of NEW WOMEN, depicting reporters as a hypocritical
pack of jackals who drive a women to her suicide, where incensed reporters walk
out of the screening in protest, allegedly offended by the film’s scathing depiction
of the Shanghai tabloids, demanding cuts and an immediate public apology. But even after their demands are met, reporters
make blatant attempts to malign the famed actress as they continue an
unprecedented assault on her character, accusing her of an adulterous love
affair, literally hounding her mercilessly, establishing a new moral low ground
that she felt she could never recover from.
Nonetheless she courageously put on a happy face for a farewell production
company party the night before, ceremoniously toasting one another with good
cheer while dancing the night away before, astonishingly, showing an extreme
degree of care in narrating her own death.
While not in the film, her funeral procession was three miles long, with
three of Ruan’s fans committing copycat suicide en route, described by The New York Times in a front-page story as “the most spectacular funeral of the century.” Kwan is especially gifted in shooting
ballroom dance sequences, exquisitely balancing the modern era of pulsating
jazz music with period costume, meticulously recreating the intoxicating beauty
of Old Shanghai of the 30’s. While
rarely, if ever, listed as among the influences, Kwan’s lush visual style opens
the floodgates for the sensual magnificence of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong
Kar-wai, who was also born in Shanghai (his family fleeing during the Cultural
Revolution), but Wong’s use of color, exquisite musical selections, and
intoxicating visual treatment opened a new door in Hong Kong cinema, focusing
on mood and atmosphere over narrative, often blending together multiple
storylines and interconnected stories.
But anyone watching the late moments of this film can’t help but see the
resemblance between Kwan and what was to become Wong Kar-wai’s overflowing,
magisterial style, setting the stage for Maggie Cheung’s smoldering performance
in IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000).
Quiet and contemplative, accompanied by hushed musical
interludes between scenes, Kwan’s look back at a golden era of cinema is like a
historical refresher, offering viewers another chance to examine this period in
history, where it’s particularly revealing to see the elite group of directors
Ruan had to work with at the Lianhua Studio, including Sun Yu, Fei Mu, and Cai
Chusheng, who directed Ruan’s final film NEW WOMAN, which was based upon the
life of Chinese actress and writer, Ai Xia, who had committed suicide in 1934,
whose poignant deathbed sequence where she changes her mind and wants to live is
repeatedly filmed with Cheung, each time with more emotion added, finally
crying uncontrollably after the final take (perhaps revealing the full extent
of her powerlessness), where it’s clear film directors never hesitate to
exploit their actresses, something they do constantly, mirroring the way women
are treated in society. Fei Mu did the exact
same thing to Ruan in an earlier scene depicting the death of her father,
recalling traumatic memories associated with the actual death of the actress’s
father, shooting it repeatedly to the point of emotional depletion, causing
untold levels of pain, and doing it intentionally. Cutting back to the present, Kwan and actress
Cheung discuss the possible reasons for the actress’s suicide, where both offer
surprisingly inadequate responses, as none seem to do the actress justice, yet
the reality of her dramatic presence on the screen continues to allure
audiences, offering a taste of something powerfully new and different, particularly
when viewed with a contemporary feminist slant, challenging artists and film
historians to dig deeper, yet the artform itself perhaps provides the best
answer, as real life happened to intersect with the roles she was playing,
where it probably felt quite natural to respond with such melodramatic
overtures, as after all, that was her specialty onscreen, and what we know of
her *is* her acting, where the American title Actress makes the most sense, with much of this film paying acute
attention to the artistry of her craft. One
other unknown factor is Ruan’s legendary star status in silent films, working
in an industry that was transforming into talking pictures, where, like Garbo,
she may have been hesitant to make that move, afraid she might have been viewed
differently. The director leaves this
question open and ambiguous, yet clearly he was internally conflicted on the
issue, much as he was personally, revealing to the world in 1996 that he was
gay, becoming the first openly gay Asian director. One wonders what role this plays in this and
his earlier films, where the prominence of ghosts and alternate realities plays
such a significant role. While this is
arguably his greatest film (and quite possibly the greatest Hong Kong film
ever, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum), a narrative kaleidoscope, where no
single point of view is offered as definitive, yet collectively they produce a
transformative experience, as it plunges the depths of analysis while offering
a bewildering cinema fantasia that is so masterfully constructed, blending
together the past and the present, opening up a near forgotten era in history, where
the director beautifully mixes artistry with original content in an unmatched
personal style, especially for traditional biopic material, radically reworking
the genre. The picture that emerges is a
meticulously researched historical depiction of Ruan Lingyu, created by merging
the world of Old Shanghai cinema with contemporary Hong Kong, with both
actresses Ruan Lingyu and Maggie Cheung symbolizing the modernity of the city
by offering portraits of a contemporary Chinese woman. Kwan explores issues of history combined with
film aesthetics, personal and public identity, featuring a past/present
relationship between a film star and the press, while at the same time
commenting upon the harshly repressive effects of patriarchal authoritarianism,
sounding the alarm on the potential connections between Hong Kong’s colonial
past and its “post-colonial” future when sovereignty is handed over to Mainland
China in 1997.
Carina Lau plays Li Lily, an actress and co-star on the set
and one of Ruan’s best friends, mirroring Lau’s own relationship with Maggie
Cheung in real life (remaining lifelong friends), working together in Wong
Kar-wai’s DAYS OF BEING WILD (1990), both sharing the same boyfriend in the
film (Leslie Cheung), both rumored to have the same boyfriend off set in actor Tony
Leung, with Cheung working with him romantically in Wong’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
(2000), while Lau married him in lavish fashion in 2008, with Wong directing
the marital festivities. Blending
together the cultural mix of Shanghai and Hong Kong, Kwan produces such a
romanticized view, complete with a heartbreaking musical soundtrack, including
Taiwanese pop star Tracy Huang’s stylishly elegant “Bury My Heart,” 黃鶯鶯
- 葬心 (電影《阮玲玉》主題曲)【1992】 YouTube (4:59), winning Best Original
Film Song and Best Original Film Score by Johnny Chen at the Hong Kong Awards,
while also winning Best Actress, Best Cinematographer, and Art Direction.
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