I’ve always been a fan of movies about the movies, but ultimately I walked away from Stanley Kwan’s The Actress (1992) more disappointed by its irony than moved by its insights on the process of creating cinema. That’s not to say that the film reveals nothing about the compelling subject of the silent Hong Kong cinema of the late 1920s and early 30s. In fact it does a fine job in this regard, and in its more obvious purpose of chronicling the final years of the silent star Ruan Lingyu. It even points, in a fair and nuanced fashion, to the possible explanations for her startling suicide at the age of 24. What it lacks however, and what perhaps is a given for Hong Kong audiences, is an explanation of why she so captivated them in the first place, and why, so many years later, she’s still a relevant figure in HK cinema.
It’s possible that Lingyu’s power needs no explanation to Southeast Asian viewers of The Actress, or that those explanations contained within the film are lost in translation. As I’m not overtly familiar with the historical context of 1930s Hong Kong I suspect that I missed more than just this. Obviously the elements of the forthcoming invasion by Japan play a heavy role in the picture’s dark foreshadowing, but for the most part even this seminal event exists off-screen. Herein lies what I perceived as the film’s pivotal flaw. The scope of the picture feels all wrong. The range of Lingyu’s influence is discussed but never shown. I don’t even recall a scene of an audience watching one of her pictures.
The argument could be made that Kwan wanted his movie to be a character study, and that he wanted to avoid both large set pieces and sweeping statements about the Hong Kong of the era, but many fine films have undertaken in-depth personal explorations and set them on grand stages. Kwan never even gives us a real sense of the bustling city. For the most part we are confined to interiors, and windows are often blocked by faux skylines used as movie backdrops rather than the genuine cities that they imitate.
This tight approach might work if the film’s structure didn’t so wholly betray Kwan’s own personal feelings about Lingyu’s grandeur. Indeed, The Actress often employs a film-within-a-film-within-a-film tactic that shows the director speaking with his actors as they compose a scene within a silent picture. These sequences, often taken on washed-out video tape, also include Kwan’s interviews with his lead Maggie Chung, as well as their conversations with some of Lingyu’s contemporaries, now in their eighties. Through these scenes we get a clear sense of his own infatuation with both Lingyu and her story, and yet despite his encouragement he never seems to fully immerse Chung in her character’s world. Is he insinuating that she was detached from it? Again, this may be lost in translation.
But this is not the films crippling irony, and I suspect that Kwan is most definitely not to blame in this particular regard. Many of The Actress’s best scenes concern the cutting of one of Lingyu’s best performances by the censors – severely altering a film that was perceived as critical of the Hong Kong press. A similar fate has befallen The Actress but for no reason that I could find. It’s possible that both an explanation of Lingyu’s on-screen appeal and evidence of an ambitious scope are now on the proverbial cutting room floor. The original 167 minute runtime of the film was cut down to versions ranging between 118 and 154 minutes, and many of the original prints have been lost or destroyed. The only known remaining full-length cut is owned by an Australian television network, and still occasionally airs on Ausi TV.
Sometimes stories like this make a film more compelling. Silent classic like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Dryer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) feel extra special when we view them because we know that for so many years they were lost. In the case of The Actress, I suspect that the missing footage itself is what would give the movie more appeal. In most cases, watching a film that is unenjoyably seems like a never ending process. You hate the film all the more for every minute of your life that it steals. This film is the rare exception that I believe I would have enjoyed more had it taken more of my time. What it contains is good – Chung won Best Actress honors at Berlin in 1993 for her fine performance – but more would have made the film itself shine.
Language: Cantonese (primary)/Mandarin/English
Runtime: 121 Minutes
Grade: 2 Hats Off
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