CENTRE STAGE is one of the greatest Chinese language films ever made. It combines a deeply felt, passionately rendered story -- Ruan Lingyu's stunning rise and calamitous persecution in a viciously patriarchal though art-deco glamorous 1930s Shanghai, a superb, iconic performance by Maggie Cheung, utterly engrossing to watch (including the most beautiful single scene in all HK cinema I've seen, with Maggie as Ruan Lingyu, swaying her last tango, arms drifting slowly up above her head, stopping time for a moment that contains an eternity), unceasingly beautiful cinematography by Poon Hang-sang, swoonily gorgeous music, and, last but far from least, a knotted, tangled, post-structurally playful text that combines documentary, drama, archival footage, reconstructed archives, pseudo-documentary, all in a play of multi-layered textuality that's dazzling, complex, and endlessly provocative. Not just for the fun of being deconstructively naughty: CS is passionately concerned with both the lure and the traps of nostalgia. It celebrates Hong Kong's need to cling to a romanticized history, the pleasures that inhere in an immersion in and a commitment to the "golden eras" of Hong Kong, of Chinese modernism. At the same time, CS patiently excavates the sources of that need, the contradictions inherent in it, and experiments with various strategies for denaturing it, converting it from a seductive weakness into a source of strength.

The film is long, it can move patiently, with an agonizingly nostalgic flavour of deferred rapture that asks for an audience's indulgence, but which repays it many times over.

The above applies to the full length version of the film (available on VCD), not to the hideously truncated Mega Star DVD release (see http://brns.com/pages3/drama115.html for a comparison)