Center Stage

Maggie Cheung, in one of her greatest performances, stars as Ruan Lingyu, the enigmatic icon of China’s silent cinema era who took her own life at the age of 24. Stanley Kwan’s brilliant biopic blends footage from Ruan’s surviving films with shots of Cheung reenacting the onscreen action, as well as imagined scenes of the actress’ complicated personal life during the social upheaval that preceded the Second Sino-Japanese War. Further blurring the line between fiction and documentary, Kwan includes interviews with Ruan’s silver screen contemporaries conducted by the film’s cast members, plus Brechtian discussions among Cheung and her fellow actors backstage between takes. And despite the multiple layers of meta-cinema and intentional artifice, the film contains epiphanic moments of unfettered poignancy. Selected by Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as one of the top 10 films of the 1990s, Center Stage is, as longtime Film Comment and RogerEbert.com contributor Sheila O’Malley succinctly put it, “at the top of the heap of biopics, the measuring stick by which [to] judge all others.” ~Luke Baynes