Center Stage

Original title: Ruan Lingyu Director: Stanley Kwan

Cast: Maggie Cheung, Chin Han, Tony Leung Ka-fai

A biography of the much-publicised silent film star Ruan Lingyu, who, dazzled by the spotlight and hounded by the gossip press, was driven to suicide at just 24. Maggie Cheung portrays this towering figure in film history, brilliantly balancing the tragic expressiveness and restrained mystery that once made Ruan Lingyu known as "China's Greta Garbo" (an epithet also applied to the fiercely private Cheung). Rather than adopting a dutiful cradle-to-grave structure, Stanley Kwan takes an inquisitive, metatextual approach to the biographical form, shifting poetically between fiction, archive material and film clips. Center Stage depicts Shanghai, the Chinese film mecca of the time, in a film that, in the words of film critic John Berra, "deconstructs the many layers of artifice involved in acting".

Ruan Lingyu. 1991, Hong Kong, Taiwan, 2 hrs 35 mins, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, English subtitles, digital copy, ages 15 and over. Screening material supplied by Fortune Star Media.