By Sheila O'Malley
Translator: Issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Rogerebert .com (March 12, 2021)
Scene: A woman stands in a small courtyard. It was a snowy night. As a film actress, she returned home to visit her mother and adopted daughter. She met her lover, whom she had been together for four years, an irresponsible playboy. His parents didn't agree to their marriage, but they also couldn't seem to break up. She paced outside in the yard. Then, suddenly, she lay face down in the snow. She looked like she was going to sink into the ground. Then her left arm was slightly outstretched, and her hand was in a holding motion. Because there is no dialogue, we can only interpret it ourselves. Is it despair? Or helpless? Is she sick?
"Ruan Lingyu" "Ruan Lingyu"
The scene suddenly switches to a grainy black-and-white film in which a woman— "the other" woman — falls into the snow with a baby in her left arm. The title appeared on the screen: "Wild Grass Idle Flowers", 1930, directed by Sun Yu. The video has been lost."
This scene appears in Hong Kong director Kwan Kam Peng's 1991 masterpiece Nguyen Ling Yu, which details the short but magnificent life of legendary Chinese silent film star Nguyen Ling Yu, who is often referred to as "China's Greta Garbo" (Marie Laura de Chazer's 2017 biography of Nguyen Ling Yu is titled "Shanghai Beauty Nguyen Ling Yu: China's Greta Garbo").
"Ruan Lingyu"
When this courtyard scene jumped to silent film, people began to understand. The second scene is a real shot of the real Ruan Lingyu in the real movie "Wild Grass Idle Flowers", and the first scene is played by Maggie Cheung, who is rehearsing Ruan Lingyu's upcoming film. That's why Maggie Cheung's left arm is posed in such a pose: she's holding an imaginary baby. The first scene is not of a woman worrying about her love life, as it seems at first, but of an actress at work. No wonder the film's nickname is "Actress".
This is an exciting scenario, especially if you find that the typical structure of most biopics is frustrating and superficial. Ruan Lingyu is a labyrinth of meta-mirror images that integrate documentary footage into the narrative. But that's just one aspect of the mixed style of the film.
The film features "behind the scenes" of Kwan Kam Peng and Maggie Cheung, as well as other actors such as Leung Ka Fai, who plays director Chu Sang, and Liu Jialing, who plays actress LiLy Li. They talk about characters, try to find points of contact, and analyze motivations. Kwan and other actors also look for real-life characters (if they are still alive) and conduct interviews about their experiences. All the footage was also put into the film.
Then the film goes back to the narrative, and we now have a deeper context to be involved in the film in a deeper way. Kwan keeps showing us why it all matters and what he and his actors really want to say. He didn't want to leave any loopholes. The movie itself is saying: I'll show you how to watch this movie. Listen to me well.
All of this can sound daunting, even annoying, because the action is always interrupted by comments about itself. Some film critics complained at the time. ("'Nguyen Ling Yu' is a strange, irrelevant movie...) It's hard to take people seriously." The critic missed the point. Bertolt Brecht used the effect of "distancing" or "alienation" in his plays, not because he didn't want the audience to respond. Of course, he wants them to respond, but he wants a specific response, and he wants to ban unwelcome responses. He doesn't care if the character is "bland".
In fact, Brechant's goal was to hinder the audience's identification with the character. He wants people to not just feel, but think. That's what Kwan wanted: he let us participate in his process. In doing so, he reveals his obsession with the subject, allowing us to move slightly from Ruan Lingyu's journey to his own. A lot of biopics follow the boilerplate paradigm and take what I call "then something like this happens, then something like that happens, and then something like this happens." Guan Jinpeng interrupted this rhythm.
Ruan Lingyu, born in 1911, is a Chinese idol figure and a well-known silent film legend. The tabloids' coverage of her complicated love life was her fatal wound. Rumors abounded, and Ruan Lingyu could not bear this humiliation. In 1935, she committed suicide by overdose on sleeping pills. She was only 24 years old. From 1927 until her death, she made 30 films, many of which have been lost, but some (wholly or partially) have survived. One of them was only discovered in 1994.
But even with very few works, we can clearly see Ruan Lingyu's talent. Initially, she played the so-called "vase character" and later moved on to more politically driven progressive themes, showcasing China's "new women." She was favored for her realistic performances and the emphasis on realism as an actress (it was the courtyard scene again, where Nguyen Lingyu lay in the snow pretending to hold a child so she could feel that feeling).
As mentioned above, Nguyen Ling Ngoc is often likened to Garbo and sometimes to Marlene Dietrich, but her performance in The Goddess or The New Woman is more like the Great Depression actress Sylvia Sidney – she is now almost forgotten, but she was once a heroine known for her sensitive depiction of working-class women struggling to get out of the streets.
The Goddess
Sidney's image is so grounded that we can call it "resonant", and when her huge eyes trembled with tears, the audience also reached out to her in their hearts. Ruan Lingyu's performance is also similar. Kwan Kam Peng said in a discussion with the actors, "One of Ruan Lingyu's favorite ways to express it is to look up at the sky and be speechless." Even so, Nguyen Ling Ngoc seems to be very "grounded", so her work is still very modern. (Several of Ruan's films can be watched on YouTube.) ）
In "Nguyen Ling Ngoc", Nguyen Ling Ngoc said, "Acting is like going crazy. The actors are crazy. I'm one of them." In many scenes, Nguyen Lingyu portrayed some of her most famous characters. In "New Woman," there's a scene where the prostitute she plays lies in a hospital bed, crying, "I want to live!" I want revenge!"
The New Woman was filmed in 1935, when Nguyen Ling-ng's life was in tatters. The paparazzi crouched outside her house and trapped her in the house. She couldn't see a way out. She would only have a few more months to live. Therefore, it is difficult for Ruan Lingyu to scream "I want to live!" in her dark moments. Guan Jinpeng shows us the multiple shots needed to grasp this moment, and the pale Maggie Cheung, who looks depressed and distressed, subtly hints at Ruan Lingyu's resistance to this moment.
After she finally got her way through a heartbreaking explosion, she hid under the sheets and cried uncontrollably while the crew all walked away, awkwardly leaving the actress in pain.
The distancing effect of Kwan Kam Peng is still there: the scene ends, the camera zooms further away, and we see the staff of "Ruan Lingyu" standing in front of the bed, and Maggie Cheung scolds Liang Jiahui, the actor who starred with her in "Ruan Lingyu": "Jiahui, you forgot to pull up the sheets!" The other party forgot an important part. So there are both Ruan Lingyu and Maggie Cheung, who plays Ruan Lingyu in "The New Woman" and "herself" in "Ruan Lingyu". (Maggie Cheung won the 1992 Berlin Film Festival Best Actress Award for her outstanding performance.) ）
These techniques are multiple, and Guan Jinpeng wants to show them all. His refusal to let us dwell too much on Nguyen Ling-yu's emotional outburst reminds us that none of this is true. He asked us to participate in this project as co-creators, co-questioners, and co-investigators.
For me, ever since I first saw Nguyen Ling Yu at the Music Box Theater in Chicago in 1995, I've always considered it to be the best biopic, and it's the standard by which I judge all other films.
In documentary footage, interviews and discussions, "Nguyen Ling Yu" still tells the story of Nguyen Ling Yu and tells it in a beautiful way – around Maggie Cheung is a beautiful, Art Deco style residence, exquisite, eye-catching interiors, sparkling cars, dark, ambiguous nightclubs, and the tense environment in which Nguyen Ling Yu lives.
The structure of the film openly admits that the truth will never be known. In the end, we can only make educated guesses. In his book The King of the Jews, Nick Torches writes: "It is not the ingenious novelist who blurs the line between fiction and fact, but the one who is good at knowing information, the man who is constantly misinformed." The more we know, the less we actually know. It is better to stay away from words, "facts", "information". They almost always cause disease." The book is about Arnold Rothstein, a gangster in the early 20th century. Guan Jinpeng and his actors revisit the blanks in Ruan Lingyu's story over and over again, exploring unknown motives, squinting their eyes to look back at the past, imagining entering Ruan Lingyu's world.
Real life is not linear. It's interrupted by back-and-forth switching and clumsy missing parts. People can't see what's in front of them. They are troubled by trivialities. Everyone knows this from their own lives. However, many movies avoid chaos like the plague. Biopics, especially those of artists, present specific challenges in this regard. They contain so much content. They also missed too much. They inevitably want to show the path to fame. They are not interested in the artistic process, in the casual characteristics of the artist looking for his own path of maturity.
Curiously, so many biopics don't touch on the only theme that really matters: Why should we care about this person? What important things did they do and how did they do it? Biopics have always been passionate about scandals, drug addictions, and unhappy marriages.
It's not that these things aren't important or that the negatives should be covered up, but Billie Halloday's music is more important than her addiction. Hank Williams overdose was his most boring thing. Who is Hank Williams? Why is his career so important? Why are we all sitting in our seats? To get to know the artist better. However, many biopics revolve around these fundamental questions. Quirky methods are sometimes more effective.
About Brian Wilson's "Love and Compassion" in the beach boys, and Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There" about Bob Dylan, both break the narrative and eliminate the linear flaws, which in doing allows the film to spend more time digging into art, and the people who create it. Tim Burton's Ed Wood is a black-and-white film that celebrates creativity and the "discovery of family" side of the entertainment industry, and as such, it's key to bringing Wood's quirky directorial career to life.
Ed Wood
Films like 8 Mile or Singing Tears aren't strictly biopics: they're loose fictional versions of a well-known character, but by being unpretentious, they can focus on what's important, which is why Eminem and Janis Joplin are important. Jazz Spring is a completely self-contained biopic, essentially a genre of its own.
Guan Jinpeng's "Ruan Lingyu" is also a school of its own. This is a biopic like no other. Stepping out of the film, you will appreciate the early history of Chinese cinema and will respect Ruan Lingyu, not only because of her life path, but also because of her identity as an actor. Nguyen lingyu is tormented by her personal life and the public's obsession with her personal life. A biopic that stays only on those lascivious, painful details will repeat the same cycle.
Guan Jinpeng did not skip the two romances that put her reputation in jeopardy, but he focused on where it should be: her acting skills. As an actress, what qualities did Ruan Lingyu have that made her not only have such a great influence on her contemporaries, but also on Guan Jinpeng 60 years later, and her film archives, although incomplete, made Guan Jinpeng so obsessed that she made such a noble tribute to her?
Kurt Coburn wrote in his suicide note: "I have no passion anymore, so remember, instead of disappearing, burn." (How like a singer-songwriter quoting his own lyrics when saying goodbye to the world.) Kwan and his actors did this when discussing Nguyen Ling-yu's suicide. Maggie Cheung said, "She ended her career at the peak of her career... Now she's a legend." The question of eternal life haunts everyone. Kwan asked, "Is it good for a movie star to disappear at the peak of her glory?"
These questions are unanswerable, and any answers given will be inadequate, incomplete, and ultimately boring. From beginning to end, Nguyen Ling Ngoc is an intoxicating mixture of beauty, pain, and rigorous inquiry, following René Maria Rilke's command to the young poet: "Live in a problem."