Ruan Lingyu’s career was short, but she spent it building a memorable body of work. Her starring role in The Goddess may be her greatest. A prostitute who is blessed with a young son but beset by cruelty and bigotry, it was the quintessential sympathy-part, but by no means an easy one. It takes a fine actress to keep a role like this from collapsing into schmaltz. And Lingyu was more than fine—she was fantastic.
I saw The Horse Thief on DVD, two nights ago. “You should see The Horse Thief,” I told my friend, over coffee, one night later. She’ll have the chance: the film is screening at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox this June 29th. And she’ll probably see it for free, because she works there.
But time is money. And so she wanted to know what made it so great—so worth her time—and that I found tricky to explain. For while it would be easy to make a case for the quality of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s direction, or a little tougher, but with research, still possible, to explain the film’s significance within the Chinese cinematic canon, for me these were not the reasons to see it. It was the film’s moodiness that set it apart. I wanted her to be unsettled by it, as I had been. As you would be, I think.
The lives of a lot of silent film stars were tragic and short. Few, however, had the kind of extreme trajectory that Ruan Lingyu did: one of China’s top attractions at 21; dead by suicide at 24, after a career of only nine years. She lived a very public life. However, the question of what Ruan’s death meant to Chinese filmgoers is not an important one in Center Stage, director Stanley Kwan’s 1992 biopic of the screen legend, starring Maggie Cheung. What really matters, in this film, is what her death meant to her.
To describe places or inanimate objects in a film as “actors” is cliché. Writing about Yellow Earth, I’m tempted to do it anyway. The landscape shot by cinematographer Zhang Yimou—made of bobbing, bowl-like valleys, treeless and vast, across which one might still see a friend or enemy walking, hours after they’ve been abandoned—seems like more than a setting to me. It contains the players; holds them together; thwarts them. It forms a pocket universe, isolated from the very busy and fraught time in which the events of the film occur. It is doing something.
