Four films to (re)discover Stanley Kwan, the filmmaker of a lost time

Hong Kong’s cinema heritage is currently on the rise, thanks to a restoration campaign that’s making some of its rich clocks available to new audiences. Although the “Portrait of Hong Kong” retrospective is full of pictures on the forum, the distributor Carlotta is releasing no less than four films of the talented Stanley Kwan, whose work has rarely seen the honor of the big screen in France.

A younger brother of the 1980s New Wave, a disciple of Ann Huey and Patrick Tam, Kwan, who remained impervious to the formal madness of his generation, developed a kind of reflective melodrama that combined the refined elegance of classicism with the crack of modernity. consciousness. His films, full of brilliant female figures, explore the emotional pain of split characters, often trapped in a double existence or haunted by the past.

In fallen loves (1986), Kwan observes the fluctuating attractions among Hong Kong youths, three girls and one boy. Murder Changes the Cards: The film could turn out to be a thriller, but the policeman (Chow Yun-fat, very young) chooses to engage in a dance of feelings and a story of jumping to Taiwan to accompany the body. lost. From this second film, the filmmaker uses the careful art of narrative involution. It puts a trio of heroines on the brink of fame: one wants to become an actress, another a singer, the third a model. Tucked away in a blizzard of colorful costumes and fashionable decorations, this dream turns out to be a smokescreen that beckons hearts.

The tone is broken

Another loophole extends to the time scale red (1987), the immediate sequel to Incredible Beauty. A 1930s courtesan (the amazing Anita Mui) wanders into the 1980s as a ghost to find the gallant young opium addict (Leslie Cheng) she loved, aided by a modern couple. In the friction of time we measure the irreversible evolution of a love bond, yesterday absolute, today loose and uncertain. But also a radical renewal of the city, eager for modernity to bury the traces of the past. The brilliance of the camera movements and flickering chiaroscuro is complemented here by the boldness of the break in tone as the back and forth of the alternating montage.

This persistent decline of lost times and places is again what Stanley Kwan captures, this time on a larger scale. center stage (1991), the centerpiece of his filmography, which was released in a long version of 155 minutes. This mural recreates the short life of Ruan Lingyu, a Cantonese silent film star actor in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, who killed himself at the age of 25 under the pressure of a rumor even before we could record his voice. The colorful historical story is matched by black-and-white filming scenes, all among the rare archives of the “Chinese Greta Garbo” thrown from one love to another.. The dazzling Maggie Chung lends her features and her serious range, and so it’s the two actresses, the fallen star and her interpreter, who are pitted against each other in the film. An Orphic device through which Kwan asks: What is the actor the guardian of? And above all: Is it not the lifeblood of the whole age that runs through it?