Days of Being Maggie Cheung

In 2016, the year that Metrograph opened its doors on Ludlow St., we presented a retrospective of what our catalog copy described “the quintessential Chinese screen icon of our time,” the incomparable Maggie Cheung. We see little reason to modify that panegyric phrasing and, today, with a restoration of the Maggie-starring Tsui Hark fantasy Green Snake (1993) newly available, the time feels ripe for another visit from that actress who, per her sometime director and former partner, Olivier Assayas, “was instrumental in a movement that transformed world cinema”—a thoroughly modern star who retained something of Golden Age glamour and mystique. Though Cheung has long retired from acting on her own terms and swathed in closely protected, Garbo-like silence, respect must be regularly paid to cinema’s Queen in Exile.