FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE
I just saw the restored and uncut version of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine that was originally released in 1993. It is an auspicious time to see this movie. The United States and China have started a new Cold War which makes it crucial to understand China, the new enemy. And 20th-century history is very helpful for making sense of this ancient civilization.
Farewell My Concubine gives us a glimpse of what China was like from the 1930s through the 1980s by weaving together historical events and the intertwined lives of two male actors in the Peking Opera, one of whom plays female parts. The actor playing female parts is in love with his co-star who loves a prostitute whom he marries.
The beautiful world of traditional opera compensates for the savage social reality and the murderous politics. The leading characters have their own ways of adapting to the harsh outside world: collaboration, resistance, withdrawal. But all are severely damaged, reduced to their most naked selves. None keep their integrity, and I see the different sides of myself in all of them. I couldn’t help but draw close to them. What would I do in terrible situations like the Cultural Revolution (brought to life in a frightening way)?
My life in the United States and Japan has been so different from that of the characters during a roughly similar time period, although I am only two decades younger. The hardships are very remote from my world: being orphaned as a young child, beaten and whipped while being trained as actors, subjected to political whims.
The gap between American and Chinese lives is huge. This film gives us a historical vantage point. Without it, much of the present US-China conflict cannot be understood. This is the 20th-century world that Chinese elites may prefer to forget, except as a motivation for recapturing past civilizational glories. What happened during a very humiliating time gives us a context for the Communist Revolution of 1949, just as the debacle of the Cultural Revolution helps explain the reform movement that followed.
I am reminded of other memorable films. One is the movie Sunshine (1999) by Istvan Szabo, a three-hour film that encompasses 20th century Hungarian history and focuses on a wealthy Jewish family that must adapt to various regimes: monarchy, communism, fascism, and communism again. It depicts a broad swath of history in a dramatic and powerful way, similar to Farewell My Concubine. Its lesson is that despite revolutions, only elites rule and tyranny doesn’t end.
Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (1943) is another gorgeous film that is focused on the theater and involves a love triangle. It recaptures the world of mid-19th-century Paris. As in the Chinese film, there is the connection between patronage and the arts in a semi-feudal society. A strong woman character also makes her way in a man’s world through her wits and beauty, while being viewed by the surrounding society as of dubious character. However, politics does not intrude into the world of these artists, even though it was a time when popular movements were active.
Chen Kaige’s film is revealing, beautiful, tragic, and his characters are so human. It takes me into a different universe, and I see other facets of life that I have not known but may yet encounter: life at its extremes when political conflict and disorder intrude.
