4 stars
When I first saw it in a theater 30+ years ago, I didn’t know what to make of Farewell, My Concubine. It was a visual masterpiece, a grand epic that spanned nearly 70 years of Chinese history. But the story left me confused. And the music drove me nuts.
What a difference three decades of movie watching and professional movie reviewing can make. (And when they invent a workable time machine, I promise to travel back to the Avon Cinema in Providence, RI, circa 1993, find the younger me sitting in the darkened fourth row, and slap myself upside the head.) I don’t plan on buying the soundtrack and driving around with Farewell My Concubine blasting through the open car windows. Still, today, I can appreciate the heartbreaking love story – or love stories – at the heart of the film. I also can understand how the universal themes of love, survival, and passion in the face of adversity can resonate with the times we live in today.
Directed by Kaige Chen (Killing Me Softly), Farewell My Concubine tells the story of Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) from their early days as orphans at an opera training school through their glory years as the living embodiment of the classic Peking Opera about a king and his loyal concubine. The film also captures their almost fatal battle with the powers that be during China’s Cultural Revolution and finally ends with their reunion on the stage to perform their roles one more time. It’s a lot, especially if you haven’t done your homework on Chinese history and classical music arts. Kaige doesn’t spend much time explaining the eras the pair go through, which is fair given that he made it for the people of his native land and not the global audience that eventually fell in love with his film. Don’t get bogged down in the historical details; as you learn, the film isn’t about the events that ended up in the history books but the impact this event had on Duan and Cheng.
That is why Farewell My Concubine rings so true to audiences today. There is a scene in the movie where the two opera stars are dragged through the streets by a gang of the political leaders’ “chosen” people who threaten and beat the artists into renouncing their decadent ways, professional and personal. The political thugs drive the crowds surrounding them into a frenzy, proclaiming that only an execution will satisfy the citizens. It’s not only at the heart of the drama in Kaige’s film but a harbinger of what will happen in Nazi Germany and what could happen in America today.
Freedom of expression through art is only one of the rights the new government plans to wipe out in the name of its cultural revolution. Cheng’s homosexuality and the sex worker past of the woman, Juxian (Gong Li), who comes between Chen and Duan, are also, under the ultra-conservative regime, crimes punishable by imprisonment or death. It underlines the terror the movie makes you feel.
Farewell My Concubine is now available in 4K UHD and Blu-Ray Special Editions from The Criterion Collection.
