Centre Stage is one of the rare viewing experiences which restore and deepen one's love and understanding of movies. From a negative point-of-view, the film reminds us (by embodying a whole other approach) of the tawdriness and triviality of US movies and pop culture generally. What if this were an American movie about an American female icon (Monroe, Gloria Swanson, Margaret Sullavan, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland)? The character (and no doubt the approach taken by the woman playing the character) would be defined by whom she slept with, whom she didn't sleep with, what sort of drugs she took, how many times she beat up her kids, how many times she showed up drunk on the set. "Truth" defined as filth. Yet (of course) the movie would end with some sentiment telling us how terribly misunderstood the American legend was and how basically good she was. Most important, there would be no connections made between the woman, her life, and the power relations surrounding her.
Positively, Centre Stage is pure tenderness -- pure joy, heart, and magic. Cheung, one of the most beautiful women of her time, also happens to be one of the greatest movie actresses (the greatest?) of her time. Her look is always mesmerizing, but Centre Stage is another place entirely: the 1920s and early 30s visions she embodies as Ruan Lingyu make her unearthly -- director Stanley Kwan's desire: for Kwan defines Lingyu in purely spiritual terms -- as a great, beautiful soul: great because entirely moral: incapable of evil, or rudeness, or anything degrading of life: beauty outside because beauty inside. Kwan tethers physical beauty and grace to moral and spiritual grace. But of course it's as much Cheung as Kwan. Perhaps she is as strong a moral agent on set as was Cary Grant. Here, she makes the movie glow with holiness, she and Kwan rejecting postmodern morality, particularly as it applies to private life.
One of the most beautiful women of our time turns out to be one of the strongest movie forces for "goodness" in our time. Maggie Cheung is the anti-Madonna. (Or, actually, the true Madonna. . .)
