Captivated by Leslie Cheung's total immersion in 'Farewell My Concubine'
"Farewell My Concubine 4K" (1993 / China, Hong Kong, Taiwan) Director: Chen Kaige Cast: Leslie Cheung, Gong Li
A grand epic that won the Cannes Palme d'Or, depicting Peking opera actors tossed about by turbulent times
This masterpiece by director Chen Kaige is a brilliant visual depiction of the love-hate drama between two Peking opera actors who have overcome rigorous training together since childhood, set against the backdrop of turbulent times from the Second Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. It is a masterpiece that became the first Chinese-language film to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
This is essentially a grand historical drama, so it's a film nearly three hours long. I don't remember much from when I saw it before, perhaps it was on TV. I had thought it was just a film layering Peking opera with Chinese history, but it was a bit different.
Leslie Cheung's protagonist is abandoned by his prostitute mother and enters a Peking opera training school (like a Chinese acrobat troupe), where he forms a duo with his senior apprentice Duan Xiaolou for "Farewell My Concubine," which becomes a sensation. It is a play based on the four-character idiom "besieged on all sides," telling the story of the King of Chu, who was destroyed by the Han dynasty, and his concubine who shares his fate. I learned later that the king was Xiang Yu. Peking opera has comedic elements similar to kyogen, and Duan Xiaolou, who plays the king, objectively separates reality from the play (fiction) as a comedic actor, but Cheng Dieyi, played by Leslie Cheung, has no boundary between fiction and reality and becomes the role itself. This is because Peking opera was his life, his place of belonging.
As a metafiction where that place of belonging becomes "besieged on all sides" by the changing history of China, the love tragedy of the love triangle between the two and Gong Li, who becomes Duan Xiaolou's wife, gets intertwined.
Gong Li's wife is a former prostitute, which overlaps with Dieyi's mother. That might be part of the mother's hateful side, but more than anything, because he had abandoned his male self and found a way to live as a Peking opera actor by becoming a woman, his jealousy was intense. Since performing "Farewell My Concubine" together was his place of belonging, it was effectively the relationship of a real king and his concubine.
He survives the Japanese occupation era because his art was liked by a general and by Yuan Shikai, who was a backer of Peking opera, but conversely, when China becomes a communist country, Peking opera is criticized. It is a love triangle within that, and gradually the wife, Juxian, follows the same fate, but it is Duan Xiaolou who betrays them (in a way that sells them both out to the Communist Party). That scene is a highlight of the film during the oppression of the Cultural Revolution era, and in the end, you are shown the ugly side of communism where special talent is oppressed by the masses. In that, Dieyi's figure fighting as "besieged on all sides" was a performance so authentic it made me think it was also a battle for Leslie Cheung himself. In Japanese terms, it would be like Tamasaburo being forced to undergo self-criticism. Well, the best part is Leslie Cheung's acting, and while Zhang Fengyi seems to navigate the times well with one side as a comedic actor playing Duan Xiaolou, he loses his wife, and in the end, it becomes the scene of "Farewell My Concubine" itself. The way these plays-within-plays affect the main plot is brilliant. Also, there was a scene where he is betrayed by a disciple he raised as an abandoned child, so it was a production packed with developments. It might be a film that feels long because of that.