Center Stage (Stanley Kwan, 1992)

[The following is my Blind Spots review for September]

Using period-appropriate filming techniques for movies set in the 20th century is hardly new, especially in the use of melodramatic lighting and color. But Stanley Kwan's Center Stage (a.k.a. Actress) actually incorporates the techniques into the film at hand, the biopic of 1930s star Ruan Ling-yu doubling as a recreation of both period-appropriate Chinese melodrama and the postwar American melodrama as practiced by Sirk, Ray et al. By going outside the stylistic touches of the film's time to broadly canvas melodrama as a fluid, evolving, international artform and expression. As if to to prove to the audience why they should care for the film's subject, Kwan establishes the artistic worth of the medium and genre in which she worked.

Yet this also sets the stage for Kwan to show how the films in which Ruan gained her fame—tales of harassed and martyred women misunderstood and abused by social forces and an ignorant mob—were reflected in the tragedy of her short life. Her penultimate film, New Women, portrayed the press as an insensitive pack of jackals who drove a women to her suicide, an outrage that prompted vindictive newspapers to...drive this woman to her suicide. It is a twisted irony, and the director adds a layer of his own by including black-and-white scenes of himself and the actors as themselves, discussing their "characters" and interviewing surviving members of the Chinese film industry who worked with the actress. The film's first scene depicts Kwan explaining Ruan's career arc, which began with minor roles in fluff before she went to a film studio that prided itself on more progressive, artistic work and her career exploded. Maggie Cheung, who plays Ruan, notes with a laugh that her own path recalls Ruan. In another case of life imitating art, Cheung would use this very part to transition from supporting roles to becoming one of the most respected actresses on the international stage. When making a film biography of a film star, one supposes that self-reflexivity is unavoidable.

The shift to color when Center Stage moves into the past floods the screen with golden light, radiant reds and the cool blues of Technicolor night. Seemingly everything is a reflective surface, the ascendant star always surrounded by twinkles of brilliant light. Yet as with so many melodramas, all that florid beauty serves as a cage for the protagonist, who finds herself restricted not only by the sudden, overwhelming fame that falls on her young shoulders but by the male-dominated system that exploits her to cast a bitterly ironic image of a progressive studio. Kwan shows the shooting of Ruan's most famous films from behind the scenes, his color stock picking up the extra makeup pancaked onto actors's faces for the black-and-white silents, the male directors calling out from behind the camera to give Ruan instructions during a shot. As a symbol for the Lianhua Film Company, Ruan and her bevy of impoverished, sacrificial prostitutes and workers put them at the forefront of class-conscious filmmaking, yet the audience for Center Stage sees all the strings attached to the marionettes.

Nevertheless, Kwan and Cheung do show Ruan's talent as an actress. Where the men on-set tend to give pointers through a simplistic recap of how the character feels as a result of what has happened to her, Ruan can actually empathize with the characters set up as props for the studio's pro-Communist viewpoints. On the set of Little Toys, she coaches her costar, Li Lili (Carina Lau), by succinctly and eloquently guiding the other actress to truly picturing the scene as it affects their characters. So skilled is Ruan at inhabiting her characters that her youth—she did not live to see her 25th birthday—feels irrelevant to the maturity and dignity with which she imbues her roles. In Little Toys, for example, Lili's character in question is Ruan's 17-year-old daughter. But Cheung and Lau play the actresses as taking it as seriously as the real people appear to be in the clips of the actual Little Toys Kwan includes in the film. Throughout, Cheung plays Ruan not as a wide-eyed girl off the bus who finds herself swept up in stardom but an intelligent woman who knows full well that her entire professional life is being decided by studio executives who want her to always be "the next ______," the new big thing who will one day be thrown out when she is "too old" at 30. Likewise, Ruan is aware she must work overtime to make sure the details of her chaotic personal life never escape closed doors lest it destroy. And when, in the wake of New Women's disastrous press screening, she looks in a newspaper and sees headlines about her affair, her scream sounds like that of a mother who lost her child. She knows in an instant what this means, and she cannot cope with it.

Soon, Ruan would be dead, immortalizing her as an icon in China but also preventing her from working into an era with more consistent film preservation. As if to further complicate her mythic status, so many of the films she made are now lost, as explained by intertitles Kwan places over stills and surviving reels of those movies. That the film partially "recreates" those movies by showing their production adds a metacinematic element to its reconstruction of the star's life by rebuilding the work that, in many cases, no longer exists. In the climax, Kwan waves together real images of Ruan's funeral with Cheung posed for the same, but he also contrasts his sets standing in for Lianhua studios for the real thing, in disrepair at the time of filming. The studio fell into decline after Ruan's death, largely because of the escalating war with the Japanese. But Kwan turns this into a final melodramatic flourish, the actress' demise turned into a final revenge upon the company that used her by turning the tide in their fortunes. In her films, Ruan symbolizes the injustices of society; as an avatar, she comes to stand for the injustices within the industry that claimed to take a stand against them. In other words, it is an awards-ready film about the fraudulent and hypocritical nature of so many awards-ready films.

A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989)

Hou Hsaio-hsien's A City of Sadness opens on perhaps the most solemn moment of celebration I've ever seen in a film. Over the black credits screen comes the voice of Emperor Hirohito announcing his unconditional surrender to Allied forces, his thin, resigned voice carrying the still-fresh shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hou cuts to a Taiwanese family in a candlelit household during a power outage, listening to this broadcast as a woman in the next room gives birth. One cannot tell whether the looks of apprehension on their faces are for the woman in labor or the political uncertainty. What should be a joyous moment—one Hou even visualizes a sense of hope when the lights come back on with the baby's birth and Taiwan's official liberation from 50 years of Japanese rule—instead feels ambiguous, even vaguely threatening.

But then, it's not really a true celebration of Taiwan's freedom. As characters note a few minutes later, the Japanese flags have been taken down and replaced with the old Chinese ones. The country still finds itself under the heel of another, venal Chinese bureaucrats replacing imperial Japanese forces. Not two years later, the Kuomintang government headed by Chiang Kai-shek would unleash a mass crackdown of growing Taiwanese dissidence in order to consolidate power over the Nationalist party's new homebase. During this vicious suppression, anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 dissidents were killed and the KMT enacted a 40-year reign of martial law that would kill and imprison many more. Hou never bothers to make that coming storm a surprise, focusing instead on the sense of loss and voicelessness that categorizes Taiwan to this day.

In a typical practice of narrative focus, A City of Sadness condenses its large-scale historico-political subject matter by filtering it through the more personal prism of the Lin family, made up of four brothers. The eldest, Wen-heung, is the most optimistic about the end of Japanese rule, reconverting his bar into a restaurant he calls "Little Shanghai." But when gangsters from the real city come by demanding his cooperation, he learns soon enough that he isn't free. Two brothers got conscripted into the Japanese army, but only one, Wen Wen-leung, returned, albeit shellshocked into madness. When he recovers, he finds himself working for the same gangsters who pressure Wen-heung, unable to find work elsewhere. The youngest, Wen-ching (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), is deaf-mute, a sweet intellectual who operates a photography studio where grumbling young dissidents begin meeting before everything goes to hell.

Each represents some facet of Taiwanese response to liberation and subsequent re-enslavement, yet none exists solely as a symbol. But neither do the characters get much in the way of insight and depth of thought. Their presence grounds the emotional remove of the film with resonant hardships, also sidestepping any play for concrete objectivity by resolutely sticking with the brothers and their immediate families instead of capturing the full impact of the White Terror. By concentrating on what happens to these people, however, Hou can still address the actual events that ravaged the island. It's a hard approach to grasp, and it's telling that, as much as the film baffled Western critics not versed in Taiwan's history, it similarly vexed Taiwanese audiences.

Hou achieves his contradictorily historical and lyrical perspective through a singular use of camera movement and placement that uses geometric precision to create an antithetical sense of natural realism. He sets shots on an axis, returning to each area with shots in different positions along that same axis. For example, when he first moves inside the central set of the hospital, Hou situates the camera in the middle of the corridor looking out the door as Shizuko, a Japanese girl repatriated back to Japan following the war, asks for her nurse friend, Hinomi. Shortly thereafter, Hou returns to the axis but pulls the camera back into another room, still pointing out the hospital door but placing a second doorway to complete change the mood of the shot with only the slightest variance.

This style proves more confusing and challenging to Western viewers than its esoteric approach to lesser-known cultural history. The shots we assume to be chronological progressions are revealed belatedly to be simultaneous occurrences, and sometimes distinct areas become adjacent rooms in a larger set. For a film that situates itself in an intimate family setting, Hou's camera reverses the expectation of proximal shots and more psychological framing of sociopolitical response. If anything, the director moves further back the deeper the film plunges into its despair. No shot moves nearer to a character than medium-close-up, and any violence gets framed in long and extreme-long-shots, if not elided altogether.

Yet there is a poetic beauty at work here, with Hou's precise framing marking the progress of time outside clear dates. Mixing Ozu's static shots with Mizoguchi's elegant, long takes, Hou consistently clarifies and subsequently redefines spatial relationships in a playful but serious and perfectly judged way. And by returning to the same sets along the same axes, Hou creates visual motifs that instantly convey meaning through repetition. Several scenes occur at a dinner table in front of a stained-glass window with diamond shapes, and all of them feature some form of conflict. First, people mumble dissent over politics before being chided and distracted from their talk. Later, the Shanghai gangsters cow Wen-heung there. By showing intimate unrest throughout the film, the table symbolizes the massive conflict outside that window when Hou ends the film with a shot of no one sitting there. Furthermore, his method of visualizing the notes Wen-ching writes and receives to communicate recalls silent film intertitles, tying a film about cultural history to the history of the artform itself.

Wen-heung summarizes the film's theme even as his weary voice sets the tone when he bitterly sighs, "This island is in a bad way. First the Japanese, then the Chinese. They all exploit us and no one gives a damn." A sense of elegiac sorrow hangs over this film, and not only for the Taiwanese; Hou devotes some sad moments to the Japanese who grew up there during the 50-year rule forced to return to a still-smoldering motherland they wouldn't recognize even at its best. But Hou uses politics to move deeper into his story, presenting history, culture and personal recollection not into one homogenous whole but alternating between them until the ties that connect them are revealed. Hinomi, whose romance with Wen-ching leads to a marriage they won't be able to enjoy because of the regime crackdown, narrates the film.

Another director might have played up the irony of this, a Japanese woman speaking for a depiction of brutality upon the Taiwanese. Indeed, to some extent, Hou does suggest some commentary here, such as the scene where Hinomi diverts the political talk of others at the table by bidding Wen-ching to put on music he cannot hear to distract them. But Hou goes beyond using mere jabs, instead complicating the humanity, not the politics, of the film. She wanted a normal life too, and her flat, wistful narration proves no less haunting and resonant than the shot of an arrested Wen-ching staring blankly as he sits in a cell, unable to hear the sound of gunfire eliminating prisoners just outside the jail walls.

Ashes of Time Redux

Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time is a baffling, frustrating but utterly intoxicating film, a long-delayed project that displays its piecemeal construction (possibly more so in this 2008 revision that cuts some scenes while adding others). Ostensibly a wuxia film, Wong's movie plays along genre lines -- including swordplay, romance and Stoicism -- to pass itself off as a valid entry in the martial arts epic while devoting its main focus to subverting as many tropes inherent in the genre as possible.

Based on the characters of Jin Yong's Condor Trilogy, Wong's film actually occurs before the events of the first book, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, charting not the exploits of master swordsmen who take up dominion of the north, south, east and west quadrants of a harsh terrain but what led each character to those positions. There are sword fights, blunt dialogue and elegant martial arts, but what the director primarily cares for is the emotional turmoil under these men (and even a few women).

Occurring over the five months of the Chinese calendar, Ashes of Time spends most of its length with two characters in particular, Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) and Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-fai). Old friends who meet once a year to catch up and drink a magic wine, the two serve as the nexus for the film's overlapping narratives, mired in their own emotional crises that in some way incorporate the other characters. From the start, the film's temporal structure warps and bends around the remembrances and present-tense travails of these and other characters, with only Ouyang's narration serving as any kind of tether. But even the condensation of Wong's penchant for crisscrossing narrations into one voice does not provide many clues: Ouyang's monologues are terse, delivering what might be pure exposition but in such a stark, oblique manner that even the most direct of establishing lines dissipate amidst the fractured visual schemata and strands of plot.


The central theme running through this chopped-up story is the pain of love and loss. Ouyang fled a lover to set up an inn, now working as an agent who hires bounty hunters, too hurt from his failed romance to use his own considerable swordsmanship. When Huang meets his friend each year, he drinks a sort of lacunal, anti-Proustian wine that makes him forget the past in the hopes of leaving behind his own troubled relationship. After Huang leaves, Ouyang receives a visit from a man(?), Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin), who wishes to use Feng's services to have Huang killed for standing up his sister, Murong Yin (also Lin), who in turn hires Ouyang to kill her "brother" for suggesting someone kill the man she still loves. Meanwhile, another master swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), wishes to complete one last job to raise the money to return home to see the "peach blossom," later revealed to be the name of his wife, before his creeping blindness ensures he can never see her again.

Wong's camera, filtered through Christopher Doyle's cinematography, is as reckless yet careful as anything the two have put together: their tactile, sensualist approach cuts so coarsely against the grain of wuxia film that it leaves razor bumps and bleeding nicks. During fights, the duo apply the same stop-start, fast/slow-motion tricks that could stretch a half-second moment of light contact into a lovesick man's raison d'être or years of life into a blip to martial arts. Even when Wong gives the crowd the violence they so crave, he shifts the focus off-center: the action in Ashes of Time comes in blurred figures, sped up or slowed down until their form is broken, swinging swords that fly out of frame. Interspersed are splashes of blood that spurt from wounds torn open in the chaos. By getting up close, personal and downright subjective, Wong deromanticizes violence even as he displays one of the most expressive approaches to cinematic bloodshed ever put on film.

In the long gaps between action, the film's yellow and brown tones create an earthen palette, grounding the painterly beauty of the shots of the harsh desert, a place so endless, hazy and slightly off that one keeps waiting for the camera to pan to the side and reveal melting clocks. The swirl of surreal tones mixes with soft, almost watercolor brushstrokes for gentile landscapes, and Wong even stretches his deliberately haphazard editing and framing until some scenes -- especially the action sequences -- border on abstract expressionism, particularly when those gushes of blood squirt out onto his step-printed canvas. The director has always had a painterly touch, but never have so many styles converged into his frame. With its digital touch-up and a Blu-Ray from Artificial Eye that improves the image (comprising film stock of varying and sometimes stunningly bad quality) to its zenith, Ashes of Time must be Wong's most gorgeous picture, placing it near or at the top of the most beautiful films ever made.


Visual symbolism abounds, from the Yin/Yang character to the motifs of water and the desert landscape, but Wong only makes the symbols themselves distinct and easily spotted, not what they stand for. Some scenes are utterly extraneous: Carina Lau, playing the Blind Swordsman's wife (Lau herself has been Chiu-Wai's partner since 1989), is shown wordlessly caressing her horse with such tenderness that the stallion becomes as much a symbol of virility and sexuality as it could without this becoming a very different type of movie, indeed. The shots have almost no bearing on the story and do not even make sense until nearly an hour later, but the experience of them, the suggestive power of cutaways and seemingly extemporaneous juxtaposition, makes for a wuxia film that is felt rather than merely processed.

In fairness, the action scenes, unorthodox as they might be, are stunning. Shots of Brigitte Lin practicing sword skills on a lake explode water in symphonic boisterousness, bending nature around the purity of her mastery. The Blind Swordsman's last job has him saving a village from a swarm of bandits, and the ensuing bloodbath is more visceral than anything to crop up in the last decade's boom of arty martial arts films. Yet even that sequence is undercut by Wong's directorial flourishes, the image bleeding into white when the swordsman looks up and has his already weakened vision bleached out by the sun. The entire scene builds less a sense of heroism than a mounting futility, and when the moment ends with a slit throat expelling blood as if a spittle-filled sigh, Wong attains the instant existential resignation that lined Belmondo's face at the the end of Breathless.

That view of heroism dominates Wong's attention. The heroes of action films, and especially wuxia epics, must harden themselves to human vulnerability, but Wong demonstrates how isolationism eats at those who practice it. Lin's descent into schizophrenic madness arises from rejection, and her malignancy arises from her pain -- when she goes to seduce Ouyang in her pain, we are treated to the quietly repellent sight of the woman stroking the man as both think of other lovers. The Blind Swordsman stayed away from home for so many years, only thinking of returning to his wife when it was too late, when he is doomed and she long ago gave her heart to another. Yet he at least makes a move toward undoing a lifetime of emotional remove, and Hong Qi (Jacky Cheung), a brilliant but unstable bounty hunter, picks up where the Blind Swordsman fails. Where he has spent his entire life counting the money of each job to collect wealth, Hong redeems himself when he ignores money to help a poor village girl who can only pay him a single chicken egg.


No such luck for Ouyang and Huang. In the books to which Ashes of Time serves as a prequel, the two characters are hard-hearted and violent, Huang someone who still believes in love but can never have it himself, Ouyang a man who rejects love entirely. They are not solidified into those roles here, but one can clearly see the arcs that will define their lives: Ouyang has fled from the woman who loves him, while Huang never follows through with the love he inspires in others because he's fixated on the one woman who loves someone other than him. Maggie Cheung arrives near the end of the film to deliver a devastating monologue to Huang. Ouyang's ex-lover, Cheung's character ultimately married the man's brother because she tired of waiting for Feng to return to her. She clarifies the reasons for Huang and Ouyang's annual meeting and the woman who links them in pain, and her speech, framed in a simple, wide-angle close-up without trickery that lets all focus rest on her words, speaks directly and piercingly to the pain of unrequited love. When the story comes full circle and the two main characters discover the uselessness of the magic wine, that the attempt to forget only further ensconces painful remembrances in memory, Cheung's pain is fully visited upon Ouyang and Huang.

For all its production troubles and stop-start construction, Ashes of Time displays Wong's directorial concerns as much as Chungking Express, the film he made in the middle of Ashes of Time. By making a wuxia film set in China's dynastic past, Wong directly tackles the questions of shifting national identity he expressed in his '90s cinema, and by wrapping the genre around his preoccupations with unrequited love and emotional isolation, he reconfigures one skewing of history into his own perspective. As ever, time and place are meaningless and all-important in the director's film, placing the characters at a set point in China's history while communicating themes that are timeless and irrespective of geographic borders.

The more I wrote about Ashes of Time Redux the more I thought about it, and the initial frustrations I had with the segmented, overlapping narratives faded into an appreciation of its beauty. Less accessible than any of his other films and less poignant than several, Ashes of Time nevertheless demonstrates Wong Kar-wai's mastery of form by showing what a great movie he could make far outside his comfort zone. More than any Kurosawa movie, this is a Western infused with a thoroughly distinct eastern flavor, and even the Ennio Morricone-inspired score is undermined as the film continues and pitted against itself to let more lilting sounds arise from its disquieting electronic hum. Re-edited in 2008, Ashes of Time Redux not only consolidated the handful of circulating prints of dubious quality into a better-looking version supposedly without significant alteration but allowed audiences to see how well Wong could play outside his usual style in the wake of his first major misfire. My Blueberry Nights might have set critics back to their laptops to type out instant reconsiderations of the director -- because it is only natural that a mild disappointment should somehow counteract a decade and a half of meaningful, beloved films in the minds of a few -- but Ashes of Time is far greater a stylistic leap than Wong's foray into English-language film. It may not seem like it at first, but the movie's also a perfect fit into Wong's canon and a visual delight worth revisiting as much simply to gawk at as to further analyze its ideas.