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阮玲玉 (1992)
Centre Stage


Reviewed by: ewaffle
Date: 10/30/2005
Summary: A terrific movie/movie

First of all: MAGGIE CHEUNG IS A GODDESS AND I WORSHIP AT HER SHRINE.

Since that is out of the way—“Centre Stage” is a wonderful movie that repays repeated viewings. A seamless combination of at least three levels of making and looking at film, including plenty of commentary on how an audience looks at movies. It has preserved footage of Ruan Ling-Yu contained in and foregrounded by a faux-documentary on the making of “Centre Stage” which is itself bounded by the “real” movie of “Centre Stage”.

A lot is possible within this structure and Stanley Kwan makes a lot of it. While his movie is imperfect, as it must be, it is still an astounding work of art that can be enjoyed on many levels. Much of the art (or craft, if you will) of filmmaking is on display here, often in self-conscious, almost blatant ways. One example is the scene in which Maggie, as Ruan, first encounters Tony Leung, playing Choi Choh Sang, the director. It is an arresting shot, beautifully framed and lit—an obvious (and obviously staged) piece of bravura cinematography. The scene begins with Maggie on a set of stairs. Tony appears on a landing at the top of the flight of stairs and tells her that he wants her to star in his next film. After a bit of character establishing dialog, Maggie is left on the stairs, standing a bit less than halfway up the flight. The upward angle of the staircase is repeated and emphasized by a double railing which is like a very dark, almost black slash across the middle of the frame. Behind this are two very large squares of pastel light which overshadowed Maggie but did not dominate either her or the composition. It was a superbly balanced shot that helped express Ruan’s indecision at that particular point—whether to throw in her lot with the talented but broke Choi or not. She hesitates, starts back down the stairs for a moment and then turns and goes up.

Another intriguing sequence is the wake and funeral of Ruan Ling-Yu. It could have been different versions of the same scene, each version using various arrangements of actors and camera position to achieve some startlingly different emotional response and narrative structure. The wake and funeral seems to take a long time because it does take a long time—it is shown several times as what we are seeing on the screen slips between the faux-documentary and the movie itself. Earlier, Maggie as Ruan bursts into tears at the end of her death scene—we assume that it is relief over finally being done with the scene. She is bullied by the director, having to run the scene over and over with essentially no direction—just being told to do better, let the emotion come through, act with your eyes, etc. But this assumption of simply professional relief is undercut when Maggie (playing Maggie) also begins crying after the death scene, possibly overcome with the emotion of what she is portraying. Or possibly not—her weeping may have been simply part of one level of the movie that leaked over into another. This is indicated when the voice of the director (off screen) is heard saying, “You forgot to cover up Maggie that time, Kai Wah,” which completely pierces the cinematic fourth wall and puts the audience in the middle of the minutia of shooting a scene.

Maggie dominates the movie—possibly to me more than others—but both Carina Lau and Cecilia Yip are able to hold their own in scenes with her. There is a sequence in which Maggie as Ruan describes and illustrates to Carina Lau as Lily Li how she painted her eyebrows for a prior film. Li is a young actress who seems to idolize Raun and who is thrilled to have a small part in a movie with her but who also, based on her looks and poise, is ready and willing to unseat Ruan as the current goddess of Chinese cinema. There is a palpable undercurrent of tension beneath the oh-so-polite discussion but Ruan effortlessly keeps the focus where she thinks it should belong—on herself.

The movie/movie or meta-movie genre consists of films that acknowledge that they are constructions and not the windows into actual events that most movies pretend to be. Included in this category are movies set in centers of film production, movies about moviemaking and movies where someone appears "as himself".

“Centre Stage” is as good a movie about movies as you will find and can be compared with such classics as Altman’s “The Player”, Fellini’s 8 ½, Stanley Donen’s “Singing in the Rain", David Mamet’s “State and Main" as a meta-movie. It has as many layers and self-referential nuances as do they and, from what I have read, is also full of allusions to the history of Chinese filmmaking.

Highly recommended.

Reviewer Score: 9

Reviewed by: mrblue
Date: 05/27/2005

Center Stage is a docu-drama based on the life of Ruan Ling-Yu, who was the most popular actress of China's silent film era. During her short career, she made twenty-nine films and became an icon of glamour for the entire nation, and Asia as a whole. Despite her success, Ruan was a troubled woman and took her own life in 1935 at the age of twenty-five, when her tulmultuous relationships with the men in her life (and the intense glare of the tabloid press around them) proved to be too much for her to handle.

Director Stanley Kwan takes an unconventional approach to the film. Not only does Center Stage start when Ruan's career has already taken off (eschweing the usual cradle-to-the-grave template most movies of this type use), he uses actual footage from Ruan's films (where they are available -- only about six of her movies remain in any form) as well as interviews with her contemporaries. Kwan goes even further to break the "fourth wall" by having segments where Center Stage's actors (along with Kwan himself) talk about Ruan and how her career relates to modern Hong Kong cinema.

These types of techniques might have come off badly, like self-centered filmic mastrubation, but Kwan manages to hold everything together well, mostly through Maggie Cheung's performance. At this point in Cheung's career, she was herself being lambasted by the Hong Kong tabloid press, and thus manages to bring a lot to her role as Ruan. Additionally, her interview segments come off as honest and genuine, not fake like these "movies-within-a-movie" usually end up feeling to the viewer. It was with this role that Cheung attained international stardom. She became the first Chinese actress to win an award at a major international film festival after she took "best actress" at the 1992 Berlin Film Festival and managed to step outside the pigeonhole of "jade vase" roles she had been put into after appearing as little more than glorified window dressing in movies like Police Story.

Despite Maggie Cheung's masterful performance and the lush mise-en-scene of Center Stage, at the end of the day, it still came off as a bit empty. I just didn't feel like I learned enough about Ruan Ling-Yu. For instance, why did she stay with a series of men who were either cold or downright abusive towards her? Stanley Kwan might have not wanted to outright "speak" for Ruan, but some more insight into her life would have been helpful in bringing home her tragic end, especially for western viewers who probably are not familiar at all with her work. Despite this, Center Stage is a moving picture that proves Hong Kong film-makers are capable of doing more than blowing people up and telling toliet jokes.

[review from www.hkfilm.net]


Reviewed by: Chungking_Cash
Date: 01/26/2003

Cheung Man-yuk silenced her critics, who often criticized her for not being capable of such roles, when she portrayed Yuen Ling Yuk, China's first film star who did not live to see thirty. Stanley Kwan's "Centre Stage" is a captivating human drama told in a linear but reflective fashion with the use of what archival footage remains of the late actress's films, interviews with surviving friends as well as Kwan and Cheung, and even outtakes of "Centre Stage."

Reviewer Score: 10

Reviewed by: ksbutterbox
Date: 02/05/2002
Summary: See the "Actress" Version

I really liked this movie 2 years ago. It was long but very informative. I also think Carina Lau is almost as good as Maggie. Yes, the funeral scene is a bit long but I'm no "moron" for liking this movie. At least I know about it eh?


Reviewed by: shelly
Date: 01/19/2002
Summary: Hong Kong's greatest film?

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)

Reviewer Score: 10

Reviewed by: Inner Strength
Date: 01/12/2002
Summary: IF ONLY....

This movie has all the potential to do well. An important story that must not be forgotten. It is the true story of one of the first Hong Kong actresses (played very well by Maggie Cheung) called Ruan Lingyu, who commited suicide at only 25 years old. However, the film is set far too slow, and therefore is boring the majority of the time. I can usually stick with slow films, if they are done on purpose or not, but this is certainly one that I would never watch again. It is hard to recommend this, because the story is such an important one in the Hong Kong/Chinese movie industry, but it just comes out plain boring. I have struggled to even give this film such a rating as 2.5, but I must say that the 30s setting is perfect (backgrounds and costumes), although the music seemed a bit too far fetched for back then.

Rating (2.5/5)

(This rating is based on the year & genre, so don't think it's based as a comparison on new releases etc.)

Reviewer Score: 5

Reviewed by: nomoretitanic
Date: 02/08/2001
Summary: THIS MOVIE SUCKS

This movie is awful, just downright awful. It is tedious, it is long and painful. A majority of this movie consists of actors--good actors, re-enacting snippets of Ruan's movies, and another chunk of the movie are the characters explaining the movies to "each other" (basically summarizing the plot to the audience.) The movie offers no insight on the actress, the scenes serve no purpose except for the director to show off how carefully he and the characters mimicked the silent films (when each scene is finished a clip from the silent movie is shown.) Nothing develops in these footages, no character/plot/relationship development--the actual storytelling comes from a bunch of postproduction interviews with the historians and the actors--you KNOW a movie is in trouble when the director had to point out what the character was feeling and who was responsible for her death, I guess he never learned "show and don't tell".
The movie also has weak subplots about the evil press and WW II that never serve any purpose nor go anywhere.
The movie fails to re-build the mysterious circumstances around Ruan's suicide, everything is very black and white and the director blames it all on her ex-boyfriend and the press in the first couple of scenes. The suicide itself is especially long and tedious, I am not being harsh, the entire showing room groaned at its length. It began with a party scene and Ruan goes around the table thanking each character and with each character it flashes forward to her funeral with shots of the character crying besides her corpse. Then it has a long, slow-motioned dancing sequence that shows NOTHING, they try to toss in some ironic lines, but like everything else in the movie, the attempt failed. Cut to another postproduction interview with the filmmakers, telling us what her character is like because they failed to carve it out on film.
Then we have Ruan coming home, thinking of what she's going to write in her will (outloud to the audience) then she eats a bowl of congee, then she adds poison to that bowl of congee and writes down a line on the will (outloud to the audience, basically everything we've heard before somewhere in the movie) with each spoonful of congee, and when she's done she walked around the room couple of times before her life finally ended (and at this point we feel little sorrow for her because a. the movie is too freaking long and b. the diretor and the writer failed to provide us a character that we can care about). And then ANOTHER postproduction interview and ANOTHER funeral scene...
Tedious isn't it? This is filmmaking at its worst, good score, good cinematography (although it consisted of WAY too many shots of overly dramatic stage-like placements of characters where characters walk around the set conversing with their backs turned to each other) and solid acting--but the director and the writer just, pardon my French, fucked this movie up and shit all over the graves of the diseased. A hippo that swallowed a typewriter and pieces of papers could've shitted out a better screenplay than this.
True failure (those people who thought this movie was great are morons.)


Reviewed by: grimes
Date: 04/02/2000

This film is a biopic/homage about/to Ruan Ling-Yu, China's first film star. Ruan was a silent film actress in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Shanghai, China's enter of film production before World War II. She was in films such as The Goddess (AKA The Prostitute), Small Toys (AKA Gimmicks), and The New Woman. Ruan was a wonderful actress (see my review of The Goddess), and according to the film, somewhat of a rebel against societal convetions.

She killed herself at the age of 25 because of tabloid criticism of her life. She never married though she had two lovers in her life. At the time of her death, she was being sued for "adultery" and other "crimes" by her first lover, whom she had left. She was also hounded by the press because she had appeared in the film The New Woman, wherein she portrayed a woman who commits suicide, at least partially because of the press. This film was apparently based on a true story about another actress.

Ruan's flamboyant life, as well as her early tragic death, must have contributed to her fame as much her talent during life, as the film points out.

In The Actress, Ruan is portrayed by Maggie Cheung, in a fabulous performance. The film is largely a recreation of events in Ruan's life, starting in the late 20s and continuing up to her death. The film also mixes in a few interviews with people who knew Ruan, as well as actresses Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau (who plays Lily Lee, a contemporary of Ruan's who is also interviewed in the film). There are also clips from surviving films in which she starred, as well as recreations of scenes from films that have, sadly, been lost.

There is certain artificiality to this film, and I am curious as to how accurate it was. Nevertheless, the performances in the film are superb and the film tells a highly compelling story. It was eerie to watch Maggie Cheung recreate a scene from The Goddess, only to see that followed by the scene itself. Maggie's recreation is accurate down to every motion, despite the fact that there is no strong resemblance between the two actresses.

This film is also interesting for the historical period in which it was set, as conflict between China and Japan flared, as well as internal conflicts between the Nationalists and Communists. Various film studios took various positions on these issues, as depicted in this film. Apparently, the Linghei studio for whom Ruan worked took a generally more radical, anti-Japanese, pro-Communist position. In addition, some of the films they made appear to have contained what would now be called feminist themes, and this is explicitly acknowledged in The Actress.

Besides its informational content, this film also tells an interesting story about an interesting woman. In some ways Ruan Ling-Yu was ahead of her time, but sadly not so ahead of it that she was able to ignore public opinion about herself. In the film she is also a charming and giving person, far removed from the selfishness that characterizes all too many modern stars. One thing I would have liked to have learned more about was Ruan's adopted daughter. It seems to me that it must have been unusual for a single woman to adopt a child in that day and age (even now it is not all that common, at least in America).

This is one Hong Kong's artier films, though this is no surprise coming from a director like Stanley Kwan, who also directed Rouge, another arty, romantic film. It comes together fairly seemlessly, though it often feels as much like fiction as documentary, perhaps intentionally. After all, it is hard to not mythologize someone who made such an impact on film and who died in such a tragic way at such a young age.

Watch The Actress, and then do your best to find a Ruan Ling-Yu film, which will probably be difficult. However, if her other films are as good as the only one I've seen, The Goddess, then you will not be dissapointed.


Reviewed by: hkcinema
Date: 12/08/1999

A film so delicate you can almost break it off in your hand,this is a stunning biography of Ruan Ling Yu, China's first real movie star, a woman who lived a "colorful" life and was dead before she was 30. Director Stanley Kwan deftly mixes his narrative with actual film clips, re-creations of lost films, interviews with survivors, and his own conversations with his cast. The result is a kaleidoscope of emotion and tragedy. Maggie Cheung is nothing less than astonishing as Ruan, and she is ably supported by Tony Leung (of Annaud's The Lover).

[Reviewed by Rim Films Catalog]