Cinema China Day 2 - Maggie Cheung and The Goddess

Today Mark Cousins, clad in his trademark kilt, interviewed Maggie Cheung. Her former husband and collaborator Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Clean) described his first impression of her thus: 'It was a vision. I didn’t think contemporary cinema could still produce an actress with such an aura. I felt like a little kid looking at the great stars of the past.' Her star status was immediately apparent; the Chinese community had appeared in full force and the cinema erupted into a firestorm of camera flashes as soon as she stepped on stage. After the interview I was sitting with some Chinese friends in the bar when they suddenly sprinted out the door, leaving me mid sentence - they had caught a glimpse of Maggie being smuggled out of the cinema. Yet there is much more depth to her than what can be normally expected of a star, and she gave very insightful answers. In particular I liked her response to the question 'how would you feel if all your films were destroyed?' She said: 'I think I would like them all to be burnt or all to stay. If I had one film missing from my list then I would not be the same actress'. It was an answer that revealed her self awareness and her lack of pretention, in so far as she did not reject her more generic early roles. Indeed, good sport that she is, she laughed along with the audience at the screening of clips like the one from Police Story.

She also took a question from me (Mark also unexpectedly and generously introduced me by name as the festival researcher). I asked what her opinion of current Hong Kong cinema was since it has been some time since she starred in these films. She replied that since the handover and the decline and slow reemergence of the Hong Kong film industry it was harder to make a claim for a specifically Hong kong cinema since much of what is made is co-produced with the mainland. 'Better to call it Chinese cinema. There are lots of Hong Kong films that are bad that i am embarrased by. Sometimes i see one on a cathay Pacific flight and it is just like what i was making in the eighties only worse, because there is no longer any sincerity. Back then things looked cheap because of the lack of budgets, now they seem cheap because people don't care. Then on the other hand there is Wong Kar-wai, Andrew lau and Johnnie To. But there is nothing in between.'

Later in the day The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, 1934) starring Ruan Lingyu was played to another packed house with a brilliantly atmospheric new score by Kim Ho Ip, who played the Yang Ching accompanied by Jazz vocals and saxophone evoking 1930s Shanghai Jazz. The Goddess is one of those rare films to which the label masterpiece can be attached with absolutely no reservations or fear of contestation. Ruan Lingyu's peformance as a mother who must prostitute herself in order to raise her child, both of whom fall victim to the self-righteous, prigish moralism and prejudices of society, is stunningly naturalistic when placed next to the mannerist acting style still prevalent in western cinema at the time. It is without a doubt one of the most stunningly subtle, nuanced and profound performances in cinema - silent or sound. The film also demonstrates that socially didcatic filmmaking can be elevated to something truly artful. The editing and framing are incredibly sophisticated, the film opening, for instance, with a serious of seemingly incongruous images that reflect Ruan's devided personality as mother and whore: cosmetics and elegant dresses, and a baby's bottle.

Less sophisticated and subtle in terms of its social commentary, but still very well made, is Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, 1949), which was completed just after the people's liberation army routed the KMT to Tawain and follows a series of colourful characters living in a tenement block in Shanghai. Their landlord nicknamed 'Monkey', a lazy and immoral KMT official who seized control of te appartment as a collaborator during the Japanese occupation, and his pampered, shifty wife are little more than characatures, even if the other tenants are fairly well defined. There is also the amoral journalist Kong, the plebian couple who struggle to make ends meet with their small shop amidst the rising inflation even as they dream of making money, and Hua a teacher who is reluctant to become involved in a strike at his school and is consequently labelled both a traitor and a ringleader. Of course by the end of the film each of the characters has attained a political consciousness more in line with the socialist realist style that would increasingly seize Chinese cinema in the years to come; with the various individuals finally uniting to resist their despotic landlord, who is attempting to evict them all and sell up before heading into exile in Taiwan. However the film avoids being a turgid social tract thanks to a wry sense of humour and an emphasis on the problems faced by people living in a time of ideological and political transistion, with all of the moral confusion and social problems this entails.