Directed by Stanley Kwan
Written by Peggy Chiao
Starring Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung Ka-Fei, Carina Lau, and Chin Han
Runtime: 2 hours 34 minutes
Not Rated; suggested for ages 15+ (this film contains a scene depicting suicide)
Streaming on Metrograph Screenings

by Dan Santelli, Staff Writer

Art and life fold back on themselves in Center Stage, Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan’s unorthodox and beguiling 1991 biopic of Ruan Lingyu, the beloved star of the 30s Chinese film industry. Sometimes called the Chinese Garbo, Ruan was praised for her ability to convey the emotions sought by her directors and for imbuing roles with an emotional realism in stark contrast to the histrionic pantomime we often associate with acting in the silent cinema. One of her last and most famous films, The Goddess, directed by Wu Yonggang, in 1934, is routinely cited as a key work of the Chinese silent cinema. On March 8th, 1935, at age 24, at the peak of her fame, she took her own life, consuming a bowl of congee spiked with barbiturates, after gossip columnists scandalized her private life.

You can imagine the Hollywood version of her story: prestigious, noble, strained, safe. A notable problem of the biopic is its wont of funneling every major incident from a person’s life into a tidy two-to-three-hour narrative. Because real life and story arcs are rarely in sync, the biographical film has an uneasy history of undercutting its subject’s psychology in favor of making their life’s story conform to familiar narrative structures. How can we be convinced of an arc if we don’t possess full grasp of what makes someone tick? Are all famous people simply swept up by the winds of destiny? And what are we to make of biopics that stir the senses but leave one asking “what’s the point?” Can profundity be found in a movie, even a decent one, that ultimately lacks perspective on its subject? Without a point of view, the juicy warts-and-all exposé is little more than just that.

Thankfully, Center Stage limits its scope to the early-mid thirties and sees Ruan Lingyu as a complicated woman who, in her own quiet way, negotiates for some sense of freedom within the restrictive parameters her bosses (and society at-large) have put forth. In the film, Ruan has made the move to Shanghai’s newly formed Lianhua Productions in search of more substantial roles. We glimpse her on the sets of several key productions, acting as mother to her adoptive daughter, navigating her social sphere (and the gentlemen that come and go). Above all, she’s seeking greater control of her image. The obstacle is signaled in recurring scenes of male producers and directors openly discussing the roles that do and do not fit their image of Ruan.

Maggie Cheung is a regal force in Center Stage. She can exude shades of vulnerability and hesitance without diluting that aura of certitude and elegance. She grounds the movie with her grandeur. You may get distracted by the uncannily precise recreations, but Cheung isn’t just expertly replicating the stance and gestures of Ruan’s performances – this isn’t playacting. She inhabits the role, serving her own craft as much as Ruan’s, making the actress’s plight and emotions accessible for those hitherto unfamiliar with the legend. Her performance tends toward being reactive, but when tasked to emote, she doesn’t reach too far for the audience’s sympathies or routinely resort to explosive outbursts of pain and nobility – she saves those for when they really count.

Where Kwan’s approach deviates markedly from the standard-issue biopic is the blend of narrative fiction and documentary, as well as letting cinema and history rhyme with each other, thus presenting multiple clashing levels of reality. In effect, he frames Ruan’s roles as extensions, even mirrors, of her real-life experience (or is it the other way around?); consider when Kwan cuts from Ruan embracing the snow on a wintry night to her performing the same action on the set of Wild Flowers by the Road. His structure thrives on those sorts of contrasts. Kwan also establishes tensions between filmed reality and actual reality that work to his advantage, like at the start when he asks Maggie Cheung, being herself in behind-the-scenes interviews, about how she feels playing Ruan. At once alienating and playful, Kwan eventually carries this idea to its logical extreme when, in a concluding scene, he deliberately disrupts viewer immersion by cutting to a reverse angle that sees him and his crew shooting Ruan’s wake.

These tricks of style and the mythic mise en abyme are hardly Kwan attempting to appear outwardly clever. They constitute a sincere effort to use form and content to intimate the reflective tension between art and the artist and the synchronicity of lives lived decades apart. (Doubters might want to note the plethora of mirrors adorning Lai Pan’s set design and the production offices.) Kwan’s toying even suggests a political edge: he chastises society for ushering Ruan to her suicide – the jabs at tabloid journalism feel timelier than ever – but also gives weight to the need for cultural preservation. All scenes of Ruan on-set commence with a superimposed title card, identifying the production and, if needed, the fate of the finished product (“film no longer available”). You may not have to read too far between the lines to get the gist, but the effect is telling and true. And then there’s the emphasis on Ruan’s search for freedom and her Cantonese origins, both, perhaps, alluding to national identity and, if so, opening up a geopolitical can of worms for pre-Handover Hong Kong.

Center Stage runs just over two-and-a-half-hours. It’s a long movie, but a transfixing one. It’s set mostly indoors, befitting the confinement that haunts Ruan; stylized backdrops punctuate exteriors, extending the illusion of the movies to a reality that, itself, is a simulacrum. This is an agenda that runs throughout, teasing viewers with the surface pleasures of prestige while eschewing the clichéd. The time-hopping ellipses would never come to pass in Hollywood.

Hardly a day out of the last few weeks has passed without Center Stage occupying my thoughts. It’s a movie with the power to work its way inside you and take up mental real estate. Is it a masterpiece? I don’t know. What meaning does that word have nowadays when it is thrown around so casually? Whatever the case, thirty years on, Kwan’s film remains a feat of the Hong Kong New Wave – a product both of its time and out of time. As peculiar and tricky as a Chinese box, and as mystifying and rewarding as life itself.