Maggie Cheung is Ruan Lingyu in Stanley Kwan’s CENTER STAGE

I don’t write much criticism anymore, the extent of my recent film analysis exists in Letterboxd reviews where I misspell everything and mostly note when someone looks hot. But I knew, as Metrograph releases a new 4k restoration of Stanley Kwan’s “Center Stage,” I wanted to write a little something about this masterful biopic, which features Maggie Cheung at her absolute peak.

“Center Stage” is about Ruan Lingyu, arguably China’s first major movie star who committed suicide shortly before her 25th birthday in 1935 after shooting the “The Goddess,” one of the greatest and most known films from the silent era of cinema in China. Lingyu’s iconhood is in part due to the tragic nature of her short life —she was overwhelmed with gossip, tabloid scrutiny, and a tumultuous/abusive romantic life, which led to a barbiturate overdose. To top it off, she also allegedly left a theatrical note that read, “Gossip is a fearful thing.” The drama and mysterious nature of her early death had a massive impact on her fans — over 300,000 people attended her funeral procession and three women committed suicide.

While Kwan’s film is extraordinary in the way it veers from tradition — it features speculative reenactments of scenes from Lingyu’s lost early films, a more straightforward telling of her life leading up to her death, and present-day, documentary style interviews with Maggie Cheung and Kwan himself about their own relationship to Lingyu—what struck me as I watched it this time around, are the unintended parallels that start to come into focus between Lingyu and Cheung as cultural forces.

I’m a huge Cheung stan, and watching this in light of her own mysterious disappearance from the film world and long-running speculations about her mental health and career decline, made its mark. At the time of the film’s release in 1991, Cheung’s career was booming. She had already starred in “Police Story” and “Police Story 2,” had already started her fruitful collaboration with Wong Kar-wai, and was emerging as one of the greatest actresses of our time (and “In the Mood for Love” and “Irma Vep” were still ahead of her.) “Center Stage” came out over a decade before “Clean,” the last film in which she appeared in starring role, directed by her ex-husband Olivier Assayas. And suddenly, around 2004, Cheung was gone (there is, apparently, footage from deleted scenes in “Inglourious Basterds” where she inexplicably plays Mélanie Laurent’s cousin) from the public eye.

One of the last films Lingyu made before her death was “New Woman,” a foreboding, bleak feature that ends with Lingyu’s character being forced to prostitute herself. It offered a critique of a China in transition, and culminates in an eerie scene where Lingyu takes sleeping pills to kill herself. Like “New Woman,” Lingyu’s other performances captured a feeling of displacement in the world, and there’s a poetic parallel (what I assume a gross romantic would call it) to her own fate. Similarly, but in a way obviously unknown to Kwan or Cheung at the time, it’s difficult not to draw connections between Cheung’s taking on of the figure, and the collapse of her own career.

What you can feel in “Center Stage” is an uncanny sense of respect and admiration Cheung has for Lingyu, and in retrospect, maybe identification too. Maybe there was some sort of attachment to such an illusive figure whose efforts to fight for control over her life and career proved to be too much for her? I have no real interest in contributing to the gossip around Cheung. She no longer makes movies and is simply someone to look back on with an immense love and appreciation. I watched “Center Stage” with a sad “history repeats itself” mentality though. The seductive tales of fame and decline are tales as old as time, but under this lens I have a new admiration for the biopic—a feat in casting, reimagining, and unconventional tribute.