Film: Farewell My Concubine
Running time: 171 mins
Director: Kaige Chen
Starring: Leslie Cheung, Fengyi Zhang, Li Gong, Qi Lü, Da Ying
Genre: Drama/History/Romance/War
Country: China/Hong Kong
Region 1 release.
Chen Kaige’s epic historical drama is one of the pillars of the Chinese Fifth Generation, the film movement that gave birth to directors such as Zhang Yimou and Tian Zhuangzhuang, as well as influencing scores of modern filmmakers. Spanning across five decades, the film captures many pivotal moments in modern Chinese history, such as the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution, told through the personal experiences of a group of Beijing opera performers.
The film begins in a turbulent 1920s China following the end of the Qing Dynasty. The main protagonist, Dieyi, is the son of a poor woman who is forced to give him away to a Beijing opera troupe. It is soon discovered that Dieyi possesses a birth defect - an extra finger, and in the opening scenes, the troupe master is seen brutally chopping it off with a cleaver. This symbolic castration creates a grim omen for Dieyi’s fate, foreshadowing the difficult reconciliation between his identity and sexuality.
Due to the traditional nature of Beijing opera, women are not allowed to act and so men have to play both male and female roles. Dieyi, because of his effeminate build, is forced to train as a ‘dan’ – a male actor who only plays female roles. Soon, a friendship quickly develops between him and another boy, Xiaolu, the male lead. However, conditioned by always having to play the female onstage, Dieyi begins to harbour romantic feelings for Xiaolu. Unfortunately, for Dieyi, his affections are unreciprocated, sending him into a period of depression and opium addiction.
The climactic end of the film is set during the Cultural Revolution, in which the performers all suffer a tragic demise as Beijing opera is attacked for being a bourgeois form of entertainment. Theatres go out of business and are burnt, and the actors are forced to perform new, political plays, promoting the work of the Communist Party.
Throughout this period, Dieyi and Xiaolu, the main stars of the theatre, are attacked and persecuted by their understudies, made to write self-criticisms and paraded through the streets as class-enemies by the public. The two friends are beaten and reduced to hysterical wrecks, forced publicly to betray one another in order to save their own skins. As the baying mobs encourage them to humiliate and denounce each other, lifelong friendships are torn apart as both men compete to reveal one another’s most shameful and bitter secrets from the past…
Such a traumatic ordeal is far from fiction. Director Chen Kaige has stated in interviews that such scenes are based upon his own experiences as a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. With such brutal depictions of the violence inflicted upon society by the Communist Party, it is of no surprise that Farewell My Concubine was banned upon release in mainland China.
Moreover, the film also questions the nature of political movements and revolutions against the interests of the individual. Throughout the decades, such is the beauty of the Beijing opera that it manages to survive the invasion of both the nationalist and Japanese armies. Indeed, in one particular scene, Dieyi is invited to perform for a group of Japanese generals, who sit captivated by his craft. It is only the communists, who regard Beijing opera as bourgeois and imperialist, that try to eradicate it. Ultimately, it seems, despite the promise of liberation, quality of life worsens under communist rule, and ancient traditions and art forms are systematically destroyed.
A number of issues regarding gender and sexuality are also raised in the film. Do gender roles define our sexuality, and what impact does society and upbringing have on it? For someone like Dieyi, continually referred to as “a girl” by his peers, and sexually abused from a young age, his private self begins to take own his onstage persona, conflating reality with fiction. In order to truly take on his role as a woman, Dieyi is forced to give up his masculinity in the name of theatre. Life imitates art, and performance thus becomes a defining part of his identity, in terms of his profession as an actor, and in his everyday life, where he must ‘act’ the part of a heterosexual man in normal society.
In some senses, the film can be regarded as a valentine to Beijing opera, which is portrayed as a cruel yet magnificent institution, with its performers having to sacrifice themselves for their art. The lavish costumes and settings are all shot in epic, breathtaking scenes that convey the full glory and excitement of the theatre. Dieyi, during his performances as the female lead, radiates a fragile, androgynous beauty, made all the more poignant by actor Leslie Cheung’s real life controversy surrounding his sexuality, and subsequent suicide.
By using the metaphor of theatre, Chen invokes the idea of performance onstage and in everyday life, creating a contrast between the public and private self. The onstage persona of the actor mirrors the public persona of the individual. Do we not all, to some extent, ‘perform’ a role in society, and keep a part of our true selves masqueraded from everyone else, be it our sexuality, desires, or ideology?
Farewell My Concubine is a tour-de-force of Chinese cinema that unearths the shattered and untold personal histories of a troubled modern nation, liberated and subjugated by itself all too many times. KW
