Farewell My Concubine. - movie reviews

National Review, Nov 15, 1993 by John Simon

* A much more considerable film is Farewell My Concubine, made in Hong Kong and China by Chen Kaige, a co-winner at the Cannes Festival. Oddly enough, this, too, is a two-and-a-half-hour movie, but there the similarity to The Joy Luck Club ends. The latter is soap opera; this one is Chinese opera, and, as seen through the eyes of two of its stars, the fortunes of China. The film takes us from the era of the warlords (the Twenties) to that of the Cultural Revolution (the Sixties); in between, there is the Japanese occupation, the Nationalist government, and, finally, Maoism. It is an outspoken picture, and has run into all sorts of trouble with the Chinese authorities. Alas, persecution does not, any more than the Cannes prize, confer automatic masterpiece status on its object.

Farewell My Concubine begins very strongly and ends equally powerfully, but has a long, sagging middle, where it, too, turns pretty soapy. The story of two friends, Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou, apprenticed as boys to the Peking opera, it follows them through their arduous rise to stardom, through their troubled private lives and their downfall under Communist abuse. Kaige's film is not the easiest 154 minutes I ever spent. Still, the first 40 minutes or so are utterly absorbing in their tenaciously harrowing way. The tortures inflicted by their teachers on these young boys are related with a chilling objectivity that is not all that far from relish. The atmosphere is midway between that of Oliver Twist and that of Octave Mirbeau's protopornographic classic, Torture Garden.

These sequences explain a lot about why Chinese acrobats are unsurpassable, and why Far Eastern peoples can endure hardship better than most others can. The film, written by Lilian Lee and Lu Wei from the formers novel, is clearly in the popular, subartistic vein, but the impact of the subject matter and Kaige's forceful direction combine to rescue it from mediocrity.

Dieyi is delicate of build and a homosexual, and excels at women's roles. Xiaolou is burly, almost beefy, and specializes in warriors. We see them perform diverse roles, but especially the opera Farewell My Concubine, in which the mighty King of Chu (Xiaolou), finally defeated, wants his horse and his concubine Wu to escape to safety. Both noble creatures prefer to stay with their master, Wu (Dieyi) dancing for him one last time before slitting her throat with his sword. This opera becomes symbolic of the destinies of our principals. Dieyi is in love with the heterosexual Xiaolou, who, however, roisters in brothels, and ends up marrying the beautiful superwhore Juxian, who makes him a shrewd and loyal wife. The jealous Dieyi turns cold to Xiaolou and icy to Juxian, and gets involved in shady homosexual relationships with persons in power.

The ways in which politics and history impinge on these relationships is not without interest; neither is the connection between gender-bending in Chinese opera and Dieyi's sexuality. But the film opts for melodrama, starting with Dieyi's prostitute mother chopping off her boy's sixth finger to make him acceptable to the opera people. It treats us to frequent disciplinary beatings and other propaedeutic torments, goes on to a number of betrayals and sacrifices, introduces a couple of smooth villains right out of Josef von Sternberg, and becomes tiresome not through lack of incident, but through excess. It does, however, pick up tremendous power when the three principals fall victim to the Cultural Revolution. The manner in which the Red Guards, hardly more than children, manage to make three adults go morally to pieces is depicted with sickening authenticity. Psychological browbeating proves even worse than the physical tortures by the opera teachers, which, by the way, do not quite stop even after the boys become men.

The movie toys with all sorts of parallels: politics and private life, loving prostitutes (or concubines) of three separate but answering kinds, related instances of artists performing under enemy eyes, and echoes of life in art and vice versa. But it seems to score only through violence; nonviolent episodes never rise to comparable heights. And when Dieyi replicates the sacrifice of the concubine Wu in a way that makes art and life coincide a little too perfectly, the didacticism subverts the intended pathos.

How you will respond to Farewell My Concubine may also depend on your tolerance for Peking opera, of which there is quite a bit in the movie; it is, I'm sorry to have to confess, not music to my ears. But there are many rewards for the eyes, not least of them the portrayal of Juxian by the gorgeous and greatly gifted Gong Li, whom we have admired in the films of her husband, Zhang Yimou. She is just as good for Chen Kaige. All the acting is persuasive, as is the camera work of Gu Changwei. Yet there is one thing we never find out: What happened to the King of Chu's self-sacrificing steed? Perhaps because there is no ready parallel for it in the main story, the poor horse gets short shrift.