‘It’s not easy being a woman.”
Director Stanley Kwan opens Rouge (1987) with a series of camera moves that dolly one way while panning in another direction. It is a cinematographic expression of the fissure between past and present that is the subject of the film. As is the case with Kwan’s masterpiece Center Stage (1992), Rouge examines how the past echoes into the present through various materials from the media to architecture.
The primary operation of Rouge is to compress the past and present into one cinematic expression. Kwan intentionally refuses to employ title cards or text of any kind that signify a shift in the narrative between 1987 and 1933. Kwan merely cuts from one period to the other relying on context clues to guide the spectator. It is Kwan’s hope that the meaning of “past” and “present” will be stripped away by such a methodology and that there will simply be the “now” of the immediate image.
The past persists in the present narratively and physically. Materials like an old newspaper keep the past alive in the present just as one love affair can echo another from fifty years ago. The passage of time ceases to exist for Kwan even as that is all that exists for Fleur (Anita Mui). Fleur’s nostalgia and the objects around which it centers creates a closed circuit of temporal experiences. There exists in the film 1933 and 1987 with all the intervening years obliterated by Kwan’s montage.
The cinema, more than any other art form, can condense time and sculpt in time. At the climax of Rouge when Fleur ventures onto a movie set Kwan shows us a past reanimated; a past of artifice that, when complete, will be as real and fluid as Rouge. Kwan suggests that time is the illusion of images in motion, that it is the essence of cinema which is the materialization of memory. In the case of Rouge those are Fleur’s memories that become, via spectatorship, the memories of the audience.
The formal elements of Rouge are all tied up with time. The plot, the melodrama, is concerned with love. It’s a poetic and tragic love; a love sustained by nostalgia. The plot pulls the viewer into the past while cinematographically the film condenses the past and present into one. Love or nostalgia oppose techniques that manipulate time. It is through this opposition that Kwan locates and suggests human experience; the experiences of memory, regret and loss.
Rouge is, in essence, a dress rehearsal for the more complex and nuanced investigations into memory, history and nostalgia of Center Stage. But on its own merits Rouge is a kind of masterpiece that distills the very essence of melodrama to its temporal trappings. For Kwan in Rouge melodrama and nostalgia are synonymous with one another. They are each expressions of the same human neuroses that is linked to our collective sense or mortality.
