Actress
"Gossip is a fearful thing." So wrote silent film star Ruan Ling-Yu in the spring of 1935, and she ought to know -- it was her suicide note. More than 60 years after her death at age 25, Ruan Ling-Yu may still be China's most beloved actress. Her gossip-induced death certainly contributed to her renown, but Ruan, often called the Garbo of China, was indeed a remarkable actress -- "one of the great actresses of film history" says film scholar Jay Leyda in his book Electric Shadows. In 1992's Actress, based on the last five years of Ruan's life, director Stanley Kwan takes us back to a ravishingly reconstructed Shanghai of the '30s -- dance halls, tango music, the "good life" of show business, and war just around the corner. Maggie Cheung, in the role of a lifetime, exquisitely resurrects the doomed Ruan. (Cheung won the best actress award for the role at the Berlin Film Festival).
Kwan has become known as a director of "women's films," but he's also the most sophisticated filmmaker in Hong Kong. Not content with making a conventional biopic, Kwan's film collapses time, as the actors step out of their roles to try a second take, or talk about their characters, or watch filmed interviews with the now-elderly actors they are portraying. Kwan also intercuts actual clips from Ruan Ling-Yu's films, contrasting the scratchy, silent black-and-white footage with his sumptuous replica. The film evokes a profound web of resonances as it explores Ruan's life and times, and the complex ways that film can dissolve the line between time and space, past and present, life and art.
-- Tod Booth
Actress screens Thursday, Feb. 20, at 4:50 and 9 p.m. (with Hu-Du-Men at 3:05 and 7:15 p.m.) at the UC Theater, Shattuck and University in Berkeley. Tickets are $6.50; call (510) 843-6267.
