Center Stage

Stanley Kwan’s metatextual melodrama is one of the finest films from Hong Kong’s ’90s golden age of cinema.

Center Stage, pulsing with a heady blend of beauty, pain, and rigorous inquiry, follows Rainer Maria Rilke’s command to younger poets: “Live the questions.”

A startlingly experimental project to emerge from the world's last truly popular regional cinema, Kwan's film transposes the biography of a scandal-plagued Chinese film star of the 1930s, Ruan Ling Yu, with actual excerpts from films in which she appeared and out-of-character interviews with Maggie Cheung, the contemporary Hong Kong star who plays her. [01 Mar 1992, p.10]

The self-aware drama moves at the hypnotic pace of an elusive dream, as in spectacularly staged musical scenes, set in a night club, that merge sinuous and languid dances with high-stakes emotional battles.

Above all it's a love-letter to Ruan herself. Shot repeatedly through bars and windows to suggest her character's entrapment, Cheung captures Ruan's grace, poise and modesty, whilst suggesting beneath the impeccable façade an inner sadness.