Center Stage

Stanley Kwan’s nuanced film ‘Center Stage’ contains two main plots. The story of Ruan Lingyu, China’s most celebrated actress, is on the one side, alongside Runa. Kwan Kwan, the actress’s tumultuous life spilled over dominating tabloids, committing suicide at 24 made Ruan a character of legend. The events of 1991 form the second plot which is white in color and tells the story of Ruan. They turn her life into a documentary inviting the remaining members of the film crew and the other members to narrate the story and pretend to shoot the film there.

The two historical periods and narrative levels can be compared by the survivors’ movies in which the real Ruan Lingyu acted. However, Stanley Kwan’s principal focus through Center Stage is not so much the purpose of defining but rather of obscuring the division between fiction and reality, account and narrative. The movie does an excellent job of revealing the many different forms of dystopia that are disguised beneath the surface layers of respectability, in a dizzyingly metafictional sense of how power is constituted in society and how the film industry operates.

What makes “Center Stage” such a delight to watch, is the fact that it has several narrative trapdoors that the audience is made to fall into and it takes grandeur pleasure to be able to fall into that. As Ruan’s shift in her identity from a film actor to a character more like what she used to portray on screen makes the question of purpose ambiguous, now this new version becomes, “What was the purpose of this?”. During Ruan’s Journey in “Dream of the Ancient Capital” (1930), which was her first major role in the film industry, she portrays a furious concubine who throws a fit over her lover and his wife, which hints at her character’s development in the Latter part of the film, and even her personal life. However, such understanding leaves the insight that the reason for such thinking happens when she looks at the camera while laughing and simply asks filmmakers to assist her with filming scenes more closely resembling hope.

Besides, the presumable truthfulness of her characters is undermined by the large number of mirrors throughout the film. Mirrors here, along with Ruan’s three-dimensional architectures, or windows and doors that divert attention, serve as powerful metaphors. Which additionally reveals our reality, and draws and confines it within themselves.

The action shifts quite a bit as Ruan becomes focused on introducing the history of early Chinese cinema. Most set pieces take place at the Lianhua film company, which is one of the big three that helped Shanghai become the epicenter of the Chinese film industry during its golden era. Just like Ruan, some of the studio’s well-known directors (some were hardcore leftists) acted in films that were much more inspiring and socially relevant after the 1932 Japanese invasion than the typical Japanese films. As Kwan explains, this strong belief in fighting social injustice is what led Ruan to suffer from patriarchal hypocrisy, in contrast to her male directors and writers who managed to escape this complexity.

Ruan experienced life while being blindly in love with Zhang Damin, a wasteful gambler, and a bar hostess, which according to the morals of society, comes with reasonable freedom. After this, she falls in love with someone else: Tang Jishan, a well-known businessman, married and has several side chicks – another person that society accepts.

The next sequence moves to a particularly interesting scene when Ruan out of her uncharacteristic rage, sits on top of a table while engaging in a Junior cigarette with an ever-defiant attitude towards Tang, and icily smokes a cigarette before blowing smoke in his face. This entire scene is generously mixed with stock footage of Ruan from ‘The Goddess’ which is a silent classic from 1934, in which she played a strong-willed prostitute pressuring a man to have intercourse with her.

The fictional depiction of Ruan’s character resuming presents her on a sound stage while providing her with guidance to tease the viewer through the same sequence. As the fictional director comments, these actions are indeed quite metaphorical, resisting the oppression of women by men, sitting on tablets, throwing stare elbows resting on knees and smoking is all resistance to the man’s authority.

As Ruan’s life becomes a reflection of Ruan’s movie, all the elements from her movie begin to occur with her as Ruan oppresses Ai Xia’s act of committing suicide under the mainstream society that deems modern women to be disgusting. Zhang’s portrayal of infidelity starts a very public affair right after the film is released, and Ruan is further blamed by the media, finding herself in the middle of a cash-hungry Zhang’s lawsuit, due to the press uncovering Ruan’s private life as a form of punishment.

Thus Ruan’s last movie ‘New Woman’ which was inspired by real events marks the end of her career. Here the real Ruan and Ruan’s modern Woman contradiction with opting for freedom met. Truly, this situation best exemplifies self-reflexivity on an entirely new level. Using Kwan’s duo narrative, the actual world is sufficed as an imaginative faction, owing all the attention away from the fiction itself where Kwan’s threefold narrative begins.

As the movie makes it openly apparent, as noted by Jia Zhangkes, Ruan committed suicide on the 8th of March which is International Women’s Day, and it was by the same means as what she used in her character on “New Women” where she did sleeping pills overdose. In doing so it gives the film a clear feminist connotation (Ruan is filmed showing her how a feminist should give the speech which she never would) that enables Stanley Kwan to keep portraying the pathetic women as abused but still fighting characters that he has in his works. Ever so gently more than in all his other works, Center Stage is a quiet film that has very little or no melodrama or over-the-top passive messages.

Maggie Cheung has brought for herself one of the most difficult and very painful roles which is Ruan Lingyu, she gets to play her role as an actress well. Ruan on the other hand is a woman to which Maggie has a wide range of warmth, from being coy playful, and silently putting up with troubles to being unreservedly dignified as a woman facing problems to one of a perceived other Ruan shooting a movie on Ruan, Ruan has all the traits.

But the greatest success of “Center Stage” seems to be the fact that it can avoid turning into what it could have quite easily turned into – a postmodernist lecture on self-aware fiction, that is utterly unapproachable. Remarkably, it rekindles Chinese cinema’s history, the filmic ghosts of a modern female, and the ability of the image to make us face ourselves.

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