FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE
With Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li.
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Dieyi’s delusion is made more plausible by the way Chen films him as a child. After the color prologue, the film shifts to black and white: it’s 1924, and Douzi and his mother wander into a street festival. They see a group of boys–from the opera school, as it turns out–performing acrobatics, and with Douzi’s first sight of theater a hint of color appears, in some flags the performers are holding. More color enters gradually until the moment when Douzi first looks into the painted face of Shitou (already in the troupe). Chen makes visible through Douzi’s perceptions the fact that for him only theater can give color to the world and make it real, and that the redeeming power of love is inextricably tied to theater. (Later in the film, after Dieyi burns his opera costumes, he’s shown alone in a desolate landscape in a shot almost completely drained of color.)
The film frequently links opera and life. Na Kun, the manager of the theater Xiaolou and Dieyi perform in as adults, sometimes interprets life in terms of opera. When Xiaolou announces his betrothal, Na asks, “When is the performance of ‘Candlelit Night in the Bridal Chamber’?” When the communists are about to enter Beijing, he says, “The Han king is about to enter the city.” Characters sometimes use objects or costumes theatrically or use gestures that echo previous ones. When Juxian jumps from a balcony in the brothel to escape a tormenting mob, Xiaolou catches her; decades later, during a Cultural Revolution trial, she saves him from taking an incorrect position, calling him away from a meeting by throwing him an umbrella. On the night that Dieyi, feeling spurned after Xiaolou’s marriage, is apparently seduced by Master Yuan, a wealthy opera patron, we see them enacting a moment from Farewell My Concubine outdoors, Yuan’s face painted with the mask of the Chu king.
Watching the performance–of Farewell My Concubine, of course–both boys are profoundly moved; staring at the painted mask of the Chu king, Douzi pees in his pants. In fact he and Laizi are so overwhelmed by the experience that they decide to return to the school–a torturous place where they’re repeatedly beaten by the sadistic Master Guan. He hits a boy for forgetting his lines, then beats the next one–who recites his correctly–to ensure he’ll get them right the next time. More serious infractions are punished with beatings on bare buttocks with the flat edge of a large sword. The boys believe Guan’s repeated threats of “I’ll kill you,” and so do we.
The stylistic antithesis of this lovemaking scene comes shortly afterward, when Xiaolou is interrogated on an empty stage. At first we view him head-on, and his interrogator is a single voice from offscreen. But as other accusers appear in different parts of the theater, Chen cuts to Xiaolou from angles we had not seen before, creating a sense that he’s trapped on all sides, and that his entrapment is part of a game whose rules are constantly shifting.
This film’s extraordinary unity of style, theme, and plot is what sets it apart from the superficial historical epic. Behind all the color, movement, and elaborate decor of this “commercial” film lies an exceptionally taut structure. Every aspect of every character is enmeshed, like pieces of a puzzle, with the qualities of other characters and of the society, every instant of a life is constantly redefined by the whole. History is seen as a cycle of never-ending brutality: the opera training, which leads to the young Laizi’s suicide, becomes real opera, which turns into the trials, the last of which leads to Juxian’s suicide. Love itself is constantly being reshaped, even destroyed by the cultural smoke and fire of a half century of history.
