Review: Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage on Film Movement Classics Blu-ray

Stanley Kwan’s biopic of tragic silent-era Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu moves at a stately, languid pace, but not in a way that detracts from the film’s experimental nature. Its first scene isn’t a moment from the actress’s life, but a conversation between Kwan himself and Maggie Cheung, who’s preparing to play Ruan and is getting notes about the star’s life. Throughout Center Stage, Kwan returns to these out-of-character moments, each time revealing more of both his and his actors’ thoughts on the project as Cheung and her co-stars discuss Ruan as a character and legendary artistic figure. Kwan even betrays a moment of obliviousness when he asks his leading lady if she’d like to be remembered as an icon on the level of Ruan, to which Cheung diplomatically reminds him that much of the actress’s enduring image stems from the romanticization of her suicide and that she would prefer to live a long and fulfilling life.

As Center Stage soon makes clear, Ruan was a figure being projected onto well before her death. The first scene set in the past shows various studio executives smoking in spas and idly debating which of their budding young starlets should get a major career push, weighing the pros of cons of what they think general audiences would see in various actresses. They settle on Ruan as their next major project based on the profile she cuts as an innocent naif, setting her on a path to stardom purely on her looks. As the film progresses, Ruan’s clout increases and she’s able to assert her own sense of agency, confronting directors in order to throw her hat in the ring for roles. And where an early film shoot saw her innocently request to do a retake when she fails to adequately rip a cloth during a melodramatic scene, later she feels comfortable demanding to do multiple takes to get a moment just right.

All biopics view the past through the lens of the present, but too many actually call out the prejudices of a bygone era from supposedly more enlightened perspectives. Kwan sidesteps this tendency by using his present-day, documentary-style interviews to orient the film around the art of performance, not Ruan’s trials and tribulations. And this is evident in everything from the focus on actors learning to imbibe their parts to how they navigate the public sphere in ways that find them playing “themselves” as a kind of role.

It’s frequently difficult to tell where scenes of Ruan’s life end and recreations of her film acting begin. Poon Hang-sang’s cinematography bathes both Ruan’s personal and professional moments in the same sort of hazy, almost Sirkian glow, in which many colors are muted but shades of green and red blossom amid frequent uses of day-for-night blue. On the sets of Ruan’s silent films (many of which Kwan notes are now lost), the recreations of the flat, theatrical staging of the silent era are rendered uncanny by the use of color, allowing us to see the ruby red of lipstick or roses in what audiences at the time would have seen only in black and white. And because so much of the film takes place on studio backlots, Ruan frequently has out-of-character conversations in front of matte paintings on flimsy plywood façades. Even in nightclubs and meeting rooms, Ruan often seems like she’s navigating a film, with the Art Deco designs of interiors making real buildings look like stylishly designed sets.

The aesthetic unity of Center Stage’s various recreations of the past is such that Ruan’s roles become a mirror for the increasing turmoil of her private life. Ruan’s final, most well-regarded films tended to cast her as founts of noble suffering, with the actress, in Kwan’s words, “looking up to the heavens in forlorn wordlessness,” and Cheung plays up that kind of weary despair in scenes depicting her character’s romantic affairs. As Ruan’s relationship with her first partner, Ta-min (Lawrence Ng), collapses and she takes up with film director Cai Chusheng (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who divorces his wife to be with her, the press hounds her, causing public talk to shift from her skills as an actress to her private life. This undermines Ruan’s growing professional confidence, and all the insouciant defiance that Cheung puts into her performance gives way to flourishes of despair as Ruan reels from public backlash. And things come to a head on the set of her penultimate film, New Women, which Cai directed. While shooting a death scene brought on by her character being hounded by public opinion, Ruan breaks down in a show of empathy, sobbing well after her lover calls “cut.”

That the real Ruan died at such a young age from the pressures of scandal emphasizes how the public often scorns actors who fail to live up to their arbitrary standards, and the scenes of Cheung and Kwan discussing the actress’s life and their own responses to her reflect how even other artists cannot help but project onto their peers and antecedents. Much is said in the film’s first minutes, in which an off-screen Kwan notes that Ruan had mostly worked in lighthearted roles before moving to the Lianhua studio where she built her legacy as a serious actress. Cheung, whose career to this point had mostly consisted of playing the girlfriend in action movies, replies, “Like me!” with a jolt of excited surprise. In that moment of self-recognition are the seeds of both her own rich performance here and the film’s probing consideration of the way that all lives are performative, and that artists are merely the ones who recognize this and see how control they can exert over that image.

Image/Sound

Center Stage arrives on home video in the U.S. for the first time with a transfer sourced from a recent 4K restoration that highlights the film’s subtle beauty. The hazy filters of the cinematography make for softer textures, but the splashes of color are rendered in rich, glowing shades of red, green, and blue. Grain distribution is even, and black levels remain steady and deep in the many shadowed and low-lit scenes. There are, however, some image stability issues, most notably a persistent flicker at the bottom of the screen during black-and-white scenes, whether those shot by Kwan or sourced from archival material. The lossless mono track doesn’t suffer from any problems, keeping the dialogue-heavy soundtrack centered in the front channel. The occasional music, much of it played and sung on screen, is similarly clean and never crowds out the sound of actors speaking.

Extras

Other than a new, brief introduction by Stanley Kwan, the only extras on the disc are archival interviews with the director and Hong Kong-based film critic Paul Fonoroff who both discuss the film and Ruan Lingyu’s life. A booklet contains an essay in which Metrograph programmer Aliza Ma details Kwan’s career and the manner in which Center Stage uses its visible artifice to deepen its insights into its subject and melodrama as a genre.

Overall

Stanley Kwan’s metatextual melodrama is one of the finest films from Hong Kong’s ’90s golden age of cinema, and its long-overdue release on home video is a cause for celebration.