The heritage of Hong Kong cinema is currently on the rise, thanks to a restoration campaign that is making some of its rich hours available to a new audience. While the “Portrait of Hong Kong” retrospective is in full swing at the Forum des images, the distributor Carlotta is releasing no less than four films by the talented Stanley Kwan, whose work has rarely seen the honors of the big screen in France.
Little brother of the “new wave” of the 1980s, disciple of Ann Hui and Patrick Tam, Kwan, remaining impervious to the formal frenzy of his generation, developed a sort of reflective melodrama, combining the hushed elegance of classicism and the crack in modern consciousness. His films, full of splendid female figures, probe the emotional pangs of split characters, often trapped in a double existence or overtaken by the scent of the past.
In Fallen loves (1986), Kwan observes the fluctuating attractions among Hong Kong youth, between three girls and one boy. A murder reshuffles the cards: the film could turn into a thriller, but the cop (Chow Yun-fat, very young) chooses instead to enter the dance of feelings, and the story of making the jump to Taiwan to accompany the body of the missing. From this second film, the filmmaker wields the discreet art of narrative involution. He draws a trio of heroines camped at the gates of fame: one wants to become an actress, the other a singer, the third a model. This dream, cherished in a whirlwind of colorful outfits and trendy decors, turns out to be a smokescreen leading to the rout of hearts.
Tone breaks
Another fault is widening at the level of time in Red (1987), a directly subsequent film of incredible beauty. A courtesan from the 1930s (wonderful Anita Mui) wanders as a ghost in the 1980s to find the gallant young opium addict (Leslie Cheung) she loved, helped by a contemporary couple. In the friction of the times we measure the irreversible evolution of the loving bond, yesterday absolute, today loose and uncertain. But also the radical renovations of a city eager for modernity, too eager to bury the traces of the past. The splendor of the camera movements and the flickering chiaroscuros are joined here by the audacity of the breaks in tone like the back and forth of the alternating montage.
These insistent ebbs of lost times and places are again what Stanley Kwan captures, this time on a larger scale, in Center Stage (1991), a centerpiece of his filmography which is released in a long version of 155 minutes. This fresco reconstructs the short life of Ruan Lingyu, star actress of the Cantonese silent film in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, who committed suicide at the age of 25 under the pressure of gossip, before we even had was able to record his voice. The historical story in color is matched by scenes from the filming in black and white, all interspersed with the rare archives that remain of the “Chinese Greta Garbo”, tossed from one love to another.. The dazzling Maggie Cheung lends her features and her serious range, and it is therefore two actresses, the fallen star and her interpreter, that the film pits against each other. Orphic device through which Kwan asks us: what is an actress the guardian of? And above all: isn’t it the lifeblood of an entire era that passes through it?
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