Produced during the late-20th-century efflorescence of Hong Kong cinema, Stanley Kwan’s “Center Stage” (1991) is at once a biopic devoted to the legendary Chinese silent-film star Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935), and a self-reflexive documentary in which Ruan shares the screen with her contemporary interpreter, the movie icon Maggie Cheung.
While usually streamed or programmed here in the context of festivals and retrospectives, “Center Stage” gets a theatrical run Friday at Film Forum in a newly restored director’s cut.
Ruan, a poor girl who broke into movies at 16 and whose celebrity coincided with Shanghai’s cosmopolitan, polyglot heyday, is most often compared with Greta Garbo, although Kwan’s film links her to Marlene Dietrich. Cast mainly in tragic roles, she played one in life, dying by suicide at 24, having been hounded by Shanghai’s tabloid press over her affair with a married man. According to a contemporary report in Variety, her funeral procession attracted 300,000 people, three times that of Rudolph Valentino’s.
Few of Ruan’s movies survive. “Center Stage” quotes excerpts and incorporates stills from her lost films, juxtaposing Ruan’s fragmented onscreen presence with her reconstructed offscreen history, annotating the material with interviews that include both Cheung and surviving film personalities who worked with Ruan, notably the lively 1930s actress and singer Li Lili, who died in 2005. Art and life, actual and staged, are in constant dialogue, suggesting that on camera or off (but thanks to Cheung, really only on), the elusive Ruan was always acting.
Less melodrama than meta-drama, “Center Stage” was the first movie to address the history of Chinese film — conflating the golden age of Shanghainese cinema (and Shanghai) with that of Hong Kong. It also has points of contact with classic Hollywood. The scenes in which producers plot Ruan’s career could have unfolded in Culver City. As a director of actresses, Kwan has been likened to George Cukor; his clever use of backdrops recalls Josef von Sternberg and his frequent mirroring suggests Douglas Sirk.
Kwan’s first choice for Ruan was Anita Mui, an earthy diva once imagined as Hong Kong’s answer to Madonna, but she had a prior commitment. Cheung, a former beauty queen, was still best known as the eye-candy girlfriend in several Jackie Chan productions. Although she had more challenging roles in a pair of films by Kwan’s peer Wong Kar-wai, and appeared in Kwan’s American co-production “Full Moon in New York” (1989), “Center Stage” was her breakthrough.
As much as the movie is a homage to Ruan, it is a portrait of Cheung, a performer of consummate grace and poise who proves herself a unique silent star — as contemporary as she is anachronistic. Indeed, the repeated scenes of her dancing a languid rumba with her gal-pal Li (Carina Lau) to “Siboney,” (a song Cukor used in his 1931 “Tarnished Lady”) are moments out of time.
Three years later, Cheung would play herself in Olivier Assayas’s neo-new-wave “Irma Vep,” another sort of movie about movies, and five years after that appear opposite Tony Leung in Wong’s “In the Mood for Love.” Not for nothing was Kwan’s masterpiece originally given the English title “Actress.”
Center Stage
Through Aug. 13 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org.
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