Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935) was the greatest star of Chinese silent cinema. She got her break playing loose women in routine melodramas, but went on to star in a string of outstanding ‘progressive’ movies that took feminist arguments several stages beyond Ibsen. Ruan was driven to suicide by a campaign of vilification in the Shanghai gutter press. Stanley Kwan’s film about this remarkable woman is not a conventional bio-pic but a collage of historical evidence, dramatized reconstruction, documentary and speculative fiction. It uses clips from Ruan’s six surviving films, and interviews with veterans who knew or worked with her. And by exploring the space between Ruan’s career and his own work, Kwan tells a lot about Shanghai in the 1930s and Hong Kong in the late 1980s. Maggie Cheung deservedly won the Best Actress prize in Berlin for her portrayal of Ruan. Tony Rayns
