Review/Film Festival; Action, History, Politics And Love Above All

By VINCENT CANBY
Published: October 8, 1993
Chen Kaige's "Farewell My Concubine," the Chinese epic that has proved so troublesome to
the Communist authorities at home, is one of those very rare film spectacles that deliver just
about everything the ads are likely to promise: action, history, exotic color, multitudes in
confrontation, broad overviews of social and political landscapes, all intimately rooted in a
love story of vicious intensity, the kind that plays best when it goes badly, which is most of
the time.
"Farewell My Concubine," which shared the top prize at this year's Cannes International
Film Festival with "The Piano," by Jane Campion, is a vastly entertaining movie. It's also
one of such recognizably serious concerns that you can sink into it with pleasure and count
it a cultural achievement.
The film will be shown at the New York Film Festival today at 9 P.M. and tomorrow at 11
A.M. It will open commercially next Friday.
The time covered is 1925 through 1977. The setting is Beijing, earlier called Peking and,
when not the national capital, Peiping. The film's title is taken from a favorite work in
Chinese opera repertory, a tragic tale out of an ancient past that has become myth. It's about
a concubine who's so loyal and true that rather than abandon her king as he faces military
defeat, she chooses to dance for him one last time and then to cut her throat with his sword.
The opera is important to the film for several reasons. It is the work that makes stars of the
two actors who are its principal characters, Dieyi and Xiaolou. It comes to dominate the
professional lives of both men, and even to shape the emotional and sexual development of
Dieyi, who is loved by the public for the women's roles he plays in the all-male opera
company. The opera is also a reminder that in life, as in the story of the concubine and the
king, each of us must take responsibility for his own fate.
Dieyi and Xiaolou meet as boys when both are apprenticed to an opera school. It is the mid-
1920's, near the end of the period when warlords were the effective rulers of China. Dieyi, a
pretty, gentle boy, is the son of a prostitute who dumps him at the school to get him out of
the brothel. When the school's master initially refuses to accept Dieyi because he has six
fingers on one hand, his mother takes an ax and chops off the extra digit.
During those first days at the school, which makes a Dickensian orphanage look like Disney
World, the robust Xiaolou befriends Dieyi, initiating a relationship that becomes the
obssessive center of Dieyi's life. As often happens in such fiction, crucial events in the
friends' lives coincide with great public events that, in turn, shape their destinies.
In this way "Farewell My Concubine" interweaves the story of Dieyi and Xiaolou with the
Japanese invasion of China in the 1930's, the surrender of the Japanese at the end of World
War II, the rule of the Nationalist Government, the Chinese civil war, the victory of the
Communists in 1949 and, finally, the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and its exhausted
aftermath.
That's a lot of ground for any film to cover, but Mr. Chen and his screenwriters (Lilian Lee
and Lu Wei) succeed with astonishing intelligence and clarity. For all of the complexities of
its leading characters, "Farewell My Concubine" is not a subtle film. It's a long declarative
statement, reporting complexities without in any way reflecting them, which ultimately
distinguishes a film as thoroughly accomplishedas this from a truly great one.
Instead of subtleties, "Farewell My Concubine" offers a physical production of grand scale
and sometimes ravishing good looks, though those looks overwork the director's fondness
for shooting through filtered lenses, glass, smoke, mist, gauze, fish tanks and flames. All of
the sequences relating to Chinese opera are riveting, from the brutal discipline and training
of the boys to their exquisite performances on the stage when they have grown up. Mr. Chen
is a director who has as much command of the intimate moments as of the big scenes of
crowds, chaos and confusion.
The film's central love story is actually a triangle: Dieyi, Xiaolou and Juxian, the beautiful,
strong-minded prostitute whom Xiaolou, an aggressive heterosexual as an adult, marries to
the furious resentment of his co-star and boyhood friend. Dieyi drifts into a liaison with a
rich, older opera patron. The co-stars break up their act on the night the Japanese enter
Peiping. Yet when Xiaolou is arrested by the Japanese, it is Dieyi who sings a command
performance for the occupation officers to win Xiaolou's release.
The movie is full of memorable scenes, including Xiaolou's courtship of Juxian while she's
still working at the notorious House of Blossoms, and a harrowing sequence toward the end
when the Red Guards successfully reduce their initially decent victims to desperate,
panicked wrecks, each furiously denouncing old friends and lovers as counter-
revolutionaries. It's a narrative of suicides, miscarriages, betrayals, drug addiction and
sorrowful paradoxes: good intentions inevitably go wrong, which could be an observation
about the Communist revolution.
Leslie Cheung is exceptionally good as the adult Dieyi, a waif transformed into a glamorous
star, a boy trained from adolescence to think of himself as a woman, and then scorned when
he succeeds. He's bitchy, forever vulnerable, vain and, in his own way, loyal to the end to his
first and only love.
Zhang Fengyi's Xiaolou is equally effective, a man full of bravado but one whose sense of
honor is seriously flawed. The film's most luminous presence is Gong Li (the gorgeous
actress in "Raise the Red Lanterns"), who is splendid as Juxian. Hers is the movie's most
sophisticated performance.
You don't have to be a China hand to understand why "Farewell My Concubine" has had the
Beijing authorities climbing the walls. Though the evils it describes would not be denied by
the present Communist regime, the film doesn't preach truisms. It celebrates the rights of
the individual and the importance of idiosyncrasy. Its treatment of the homosexual Dieyi is
sympathetic to the point of being deeply romantic. "Farewell My Concubine" examines the
activities of the Red Guards with such implacable fury that the criticism extends to the
entire system itself, before and after the Cultural Revolution.
Probably the film's most maddening fault in the eyes of official Beijing, where no news is
good news: It will bewitch audiences everywhere, people who have never before spent two
consecutive moments thinking about the nature of the world's least-known major power.
"Farewell My Concubine" has been rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or
adult guardian). It has scenes of explicit brutality to children and vulgar language in the
English subtitles. Farewell My Concubine
Directed by Chen Kaige; screenplay (in Mandarin, with English subtitles) by Lilian Lee and
Lu Wei, based on the novel by Miss Lee; photography by Gu Changwei; edited by Pei
Xiaonan; music by Zhao Jiping; production designer, Chen Huaikai; produced by Hsu Feng;
released by Miramax Films. At Alice Tully Hall, as part of the 31st New York Film Festival.
Running time: 154 minutes. This film is rated R. Dieyi . . . Leslie Cheung Xiaolou . . . Zhang
Fengyi Juxian . . . Gong Li