Actress / Centre Stage

viewed July 20, 2000 on VHS  Full Details

I was really looking forward to watching this one.  Jonathan Rosenbaum, who I deeply admire, had put this film on his top 10 list for the 90s -- the only Hong Kong film he had selected.  I was deeply disappointed.  The ambition of this film is terrific -- director Stanley Kwan attempts to break through the silence of China's greatest actress of the silent era, Ruan Ling Yu.  On paper, everything looks great: a Chinese filmmaker's attempt to retrieve the history of Chinese cinema, Chinese women, and to analyze the implications of this process of retrieval.  And who better to portray Ruan than the greatest actress in Hong Kong today, Maggie Cheung.  

The execution, however, makes it feel like the film is still on paper.  The acting is surprisingly stiff; the scenes play more to convey information than feeling.  Far more interesting are the interspersed interviews Kwan conducts with Cheung and the other actors about their thoughts in portraying their silent era predecessors.  Those scenes expose the seriousness with which these filmmakers took on this project.  That well-meant seriousness may have been the lead weight that sunk the energy of this disappointing high-profile picture.

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