#THE CHINESE FEAST METROGRAPH FULL#
Prior to the film, Cheung was best known as Jackie Chan’s co-star in Police Story (1985), although she had started building some quieter, contemplative credits with Kwan (1989’s Full Moon in New York) and Wong Kar-wai (1988’s As Tears Go By and 1990’s Days of Being Wild).
#THE CHINESE FEAST METROGRAPH MOVIE#
Throughout the film, Cheung’s Ruan processes similarly intricate directions while preparing for a single shot-and although we’re invited to contemplate what’s on her mind, the process remains powerfully private, everything relevant laid out with a wordless eloquence in the final image.Ĭenter Stage was also a breakout movie for its star, Maggie Cheung, who won Best Actress at the Berlinale for her performance. “One of Ruan’s favorite expressions was ‘looking up to the heavens in forlorn wordlessness,’” remarks Kwan in one of Center Stage’s behind-the-scenes segments while, with an embarrassed laugh, trying to pantomime the same body language. The filmmakers are right, but not in the dismissive way that they think they are the silent era has a particularly acute way of crystallizing an actor’s personal presence, all centered in the drama of the human face. It traces Ruan’s ascent through the Shanghai film industry of the early 1930s, where her star power was iconic enough to earn comparisons to Garbo and Dietrich Kwan seems to wink wryly at this by scripting Ruan’s directors to insist that she’s worlds apart from both icons.
So it’s fitting that Center Stage is about an actress-and the art of acting more generally. The effect of these jarring shifts is one of a trance broken before it can take hold: each layer reminds us of the complicated collaborative contexts that shape a film, all ephemeral, historical, and personal. Kwan’s dramatized story often pauses to survey surviving films and photographs of the real Ruan, as well as footage of Center Stage’s cast trying to get inside the heads of the people they’re reanimating. Yet the closer Center Stage gets to Ruan, the more complicated the prospect of understanding her becomes. A close reading of a personal life usually offers a convenient cipher. The least inventive biopics often force an unwieldy life into a formula: there is the “origin story” of childhood, the discovery of talent or some other pretext for the subject’s notoriety, and their meteoric rise and (usually) fall. But Kwan, known for searing Hong Kong melodramas like Rouge (1987), exposes the impossibility of accessing her through such limited means. On the surface, it’s a biopic about Ruan Lingyu, one of the defining stars of silent-era Chinese cinema, and tragically immortalized after vicious tabloid smears drove her to suicide at age 24. This shape-shifting quality defines Center Stage. But before that can sink in, Kwan cuts ahead to the action of the scene, where Ruan is immersed in her character-and before that can sink in, Kwan cuts to the same scene in The Goddess, where the real Ruan goes through the same motions. As Ruan mulls over the direction, casting her eyes down while her expression seems to fall, we can’t help but try to read into her inner state. Since the backdrop is silent cinema, the emotions Wu describes-a complex alchemy of circumstance and character-need to play across the face of lead actress Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung) with an elemental simplicity. This should be visible from your eyes.” This direction is given on the set of Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess (1934), as re-created within Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991).
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