Center Stage

Ruan Lingyu entered the cinema at sixteen and in her twenties became the best known face in Shanghai. In silent films she played suffering women; a factory worker, a prostitute, an abandoned mother. Her own life was in a similar place: a tangled relationship with two men, a lawsuit that would not end, and newspapers writing every day. In 1935, at twenty four, she took her own life. While telling her story the film also opens its own; Maggie Cheung sits in front of the camera and talks about what she knows of Ruan. Stanley Kwan directs. Maggie Cheung plays Ruan Lingyu. Tony Leung Ka-fai, Carina Lau and Han Chin are in the cast. It is a Hong Kong production. Maggie Cheung won best actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 1992 for this part. The film uses three materials at once; period reconstruction, the surviving fragments of Ruan's own films, and interviews with the present day actors. The director enters the narrative in his own voice and questions the act of reconstruction itself. The matter it treats is the press destroying a person; that her private life became news was decisive in Ruan's death. One of the films Ruan appeared in has its own page on this site, and scenes from it appear here as well. The narrative does not run chronologically and moves between layers of time. The photography builds the Shanghai of the thirties in detail. The ending closes with footage of the funeral. Its limit is form; the narrative is fragmentary, long, and asks for some knowledge of the period. Who it is for: viewers who like film history and formally adventurous biography. Who it is not for: it is long, fragmentary, and the ending bitter.