Fairwell My Concubine. - movie reviews

"Fairwell My Concubine" (Miramax) is easily the most exotically beautiful film you'll see this year, and probably signals the arrival of Chinese movies as a major force in world cinema. Ironically, though not really a political film, it has deeply angered Chinese authorities, who realize correctly that the rage it expresses at the excesses of the Red Guards is also directed at any system that does not respect individual and cultural freedom.

Western audiences will get a crash course in Chinese history from 1925 to 1977, and though they will not be able to understand all the power moves and political shifts, they cannot fail to be entranced by its deep intimations of a rich and different culture and its powerful central story of two boys who become stars of Chinese opera.

The movie's title comes from a tragic Chinese opera about a great king who is about to be defeated. His loyal concubine, refusing to abandon her lord, dances for him one last time before slitting her throat with his sword. Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) become celebrated in playing these roles, for which they were trained since their brutal apprenticeship in an opera school.

The harshness of the struggle for survival is sufficiently indicated when Dieyi is first rejected by the school because he has six fingers on one hand, and his desperate mother, a prostitute, cuts off the extra finger with an ax. The diminutive Dieyi, protected by the stronger Xiaolou, is coached to play women's parts -- there are no actresses in traditional Chinese opera -- and is regularly beaten for changing gender.

Director Chen Kaige, with the help of an ingeniously organized screenplay by Lilian Lee and Lu Wei, shows a masterful hand guiding us through the various stages of the two men's lives, which frequently intersect with world events and tumultuous crowd scenes. The movie is a glamorous pageant about the perils of art amid the cruelties of history. In centering on Dieyi, it offers a romantic object lesson on the danger of confusing art and life.

"Fairwell My Concubine" succeeds in weaving together personal and public themes, while showing sympathy for each member of its strange love triangle.

Readers who initially fear that the ritualism of Chinese opera is not their idea of entertainment should be reassured: If its conventions are as strange as baseball rules must at first seem to foreigners, Chen Kaige has made it a captivating way to express the constant search for beauty in an age of tumultuous change. "Farewell My Concubine" may not be a profound movie, but it is a memorably different one.

COPYRIGHT 1993 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group