FILM
Gay Director Revives “Center Stage”
Hong Kong-based 1991 fi lm follows Chinese movie star
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Hong Kong director
Stanley Kwan’s “Center
Stage” has made its
way to its fi rst US release
30 years after it was made.
While a fi lm this good deserved a
worldwide audience back in 1991,
it is oddly fi tting that this turbulent
refl ection on memory and
moviemaking, which looked back
to the silent era, has already gone
through its own restoration. Although
“Center Stage” is circulated
in three different cuts, the
Metrograph is showing the longest
version. Beginning as a documentary
about the Chinese movie star
Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung), it
reconstructs the fi lms she made in
the 1930s, which have now been
lost, and imagines her life as a
melodrama.
The refl exive touches of “Center
Stage” are never intended to
detract from the story’s emotional
pull. Indeed, the fi ctional narrative
of Ruan’s life makes the
scenes of Kwan and Cheung (who
later became famous outside Asia
for playing herself in Olivier Assayas’
far more meta “Irma Vep”)
speculating about her seem rather
pale. But the fi lm has a specifi c
interpretation. As it tells her story,
she was initially known for playing
victimized women, especially
sex workers. She sought out roles
that offered a more modern view
of women’s options, appearing in
the 1935 fi lm “New Woman.” But
in life, her choices were constricted
by her celebrity status and a tabloid
press which followed her every
The 1991 fi lm “Center Stage” is focused on Chinese movie star Ruan Lingyu (Maggie Cheung), who died
at 24 in 1935.
move, especially when she became
part of a love triangle with a married
director.
Kwan uses several distinct
styles for the fi lm’s disparate parts.
The present-day scenes, in which
he, Cheung and actor Carina Lau
speculate about Ruan’s life and he
interviews colleagues of hers, are
shot in grainy black-and-white.
When Ruan is depicted in a fi lmwithin
the-fi lm, she’s usually
coated in waxy, pale makeup. The
scenes showing her actual life show
Kwan’s full fl are for melodrama,
with equally potent use of gorgeous
colors and a lively soundtrack. But
FILM MANAGEMENT
“Center Stage” does not always
keep these three sections separate.
In one scene, an actor playing
the director Fei Mu — whose 1948
“Springtime in a Small Town” is
widely considered one of the best
Chinese fi lms ever made — gives a
monologue in character, dressed in
a three-piece suit. But the camera
drifts over to show two women assisting
Cheung with her costume
as she falls into bed, playing Ruan.
It then returns back to the original
actor.
Kwan’s initial breakthrough,
“Rouge,” hinted at a similar interpenetration
of the past and present.
It was a ghost story in which a
woman returned to the Hong Kong
of 1987. The director subsequently
came out as gay in his 1996 documentary
“Yang + Yin: Gender in
Chinese Cinema.” Produced by the
British Film Institute as part of a
worldwide series celebrating the
100th anniversary of the movies’
invention, it chose the angle of exploring
the history of queerness in
Chinese cinema. He went on to fi lm
the gay love story “Lan Yu,” based
on a novel posted anonymously
on the Internet, in Beijing without
the mainland Chinese government’s
permission or approval. But
none of his subsequent work has
matched the ambition or impact of
“Center Stage,” and he hasn’t made
a feature since 2010.
Whatever Kwan meant to suggest,
the urgency and intensity
of feeling in the past shames the
present. But we’re now looking at
“Center Stage” in the rear mirror.
A fi lm haunted by the Chinese
cinema of the ‘30s is now
one of the great fi lms of the Hong
Kong New Wave of the ‘80s and
early ‘90s. This period ended
due both to the handover of the
island, colonized by the British,
to mainland China in 1997 —
which would eventually lead to
increased censorship and endless
bland co-productions aimed
at mainland audiences — and its
own commercial success around
the world, as Hollywood came
calling for John Woo, Tsui Hark,
Ringo Lam and “Center Stage”
producer Jackie Chan. But Kwan
was one of the few Hong Kong
directors of this period who specialized
in art fi lms, but did not
gain the worldwide attention that
Wong Kar-wai did.
Mainland China has been busy
trying to destroy the possibility
of a Hong Kong culture separate
from it. However, the narrative of
Ruan’s life resonates with presentday
American culture. The media
spent recent weeks going through
a reckoning with the way it treated
Britney Spears, Janet Jackson
and other female celebrities as
walking punchlines or symptoms
of social problems instead of vulnerable
individuals who could be
personally hurt by their coverage.
The fi nal third of “Center Stage,”
in which Ruan says “death means
nothing to me, but I’m still afraid
of malicious gossip,” feels awfully
familiar.
“CENTER STAGE” | Directed
by Stanley Kwan | Film Movement
Classics | In Cantonese, Shanghainese
and Mandarin with English
subtitles | Starts streaming March
12th through the Metrograph
MARCH 11 - MARCH 24, 2 28 021 | GayCityNews.com
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