Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang

Maggie Cheung is playing Ruan Lingyu, and Stanley Kwan Kam-Pang wants us to consider how she is doing it. In Center Stage (1991), dramatised scenes sit beside documentary-style conversations about performance, giving us time to question how readily we accept an actor as someone who once lived. We were moved by Cheung’s Ruan, and found ourselves reluctant to leave her scenes for another discussion of how acting works. Kwan’s curiosity is useful, but Cheung is the reason we care about the answers.

His feature debut, Women (1985), established an interest in female characters and intimate drama. The breakthrough, Rouge (1987), brought romance, a ghost story and a period setting together, before Center Stage brought international attention. That sympathetic attention extends to gay lives, with the documentary Yang ± Yin (1996) marking a turn towards films including Lan Yu (2001). The recurring concern is how people pursue intimacy when the society around them makes it difficult.

Kwan works with actors through personal trust and discussion of life experiences, an approach that makes sense of the attention paid to performance in Center Stage. Maggie Cheung is the essential collaborator here: her portrayal gives the conversations something worth considering, rather than leaving the film to talk about acting in the abstract. Putting reconstruction beside discussion also saves the biography from simply ticking off important events. We are asked to think about what a performance can tell us about a life, and what we have accepted because an actress has persuaded us.

The reservation is about how often Kwan stops to ask. At 155 minutes, Center Stage gives us time to notice when a discussion is prolonging a thought rather than changing it. That slows the film just when Cheung has made its emotional weight clear. Start here, and allow for a director who occasionally gives us longer to think than we need.