Like the French, the Chinese seem to produce nothing but incredible movies; movies that are so culturally rich and psychologically grounded that they are almost like novels. Farewell My Concubine is about the cultural revolution in China; with the relationship between two heroes and the heroine being a microcosm of this movement.
Dieyi, who plays Concubine Yu to Xiaolou's king, represents the old society of corrupt, but noble, decadence. Warped by abuse and betrayal, victimisation literally turns him in on himself, until he becomes homosexual in so many ways. The grim passivity, of which his homosexuality is only one facet, is bitter and snide on the one hand, but stoical and brave on the other. The suffering and ugliness that lies behind his elegant pristine act (as Concubine Yu) is like the hardship, toil and exploitation that was behind the old society (with its palaces and silk clothes created by the tired hands of the proletariat). Through combining both the ugliness and the beauty of the old society in one character, the film is able to justify it: the proletariat and the nobility are one, their suffering is one, and their triumph is one. This is forcefully iterated in the scene where communist pupils attack Dieyi's aesthetic preference for noble ambience on stage (beautiful backdrops portraying aristocratic gardens rather than proletariat metal pylons). We feel the injustice and hypocrisy of their ideology, for Dieyi is tougher than any of them; he has suffered and toiled harder than the most exploited slave in the history of mankind.
Where Xiaolou represents practical masculine reality, Dieyi represents art: he talks with a distanced air of finality and confuses the opera with everyday life. This is, for the most part, rooted in psychological realism. When Dieyi is beaten he refuses to cry because his artistic temperament detaches him from rationality and gives him a tragic-heroic identity which sustains him: to cry would be death for him. Xiaolou, on the other hand, chooses to grapple with reality and play up to the masters who beat him; he takes the lashings with comic defiance and exaggerated pleas for relief. The film only goes wrong when it becomes Dieyi's mouthpiece, condemning Xiaolou for betraying him. In the world of the film, it is no more fair to say that Dieyi is braver than Xiaolou than to say that Xiaolou survives where Dieyi perishes: within their own vital spheres, both prevail.
Xiaolou's wife, is a beautiful subtle portrayal of womanhood. From her beginnings as a whore (physically and emotionally) she grows in stature until she chrysalises into the film's most worthy character. The compassion and fortitude with which she tolerates her husband's operatic partnership with Dieyi, even when it is responsible for the loss of her unborn child, is heroic in a womanly sense (a kind of heroism rarely acknowledged in literature or film). Her pity for Dieyi outweighs her jealousy: she nurses him out of his heroin addiction as if she were his mother (his mother was, significantly, a prostitute from the same whorehouse as she). However, at the end, when the two of them have both been denounced by Xiaolou, the characterisation slips into sentimentality: instead of bearing Xiaolou's callousness with contempt (as she does when he hits her earlier) she gives up on life.
Like many of the greatest works of art, this film is flawed and it is the ending which reveals and embodies this flaw: sentimentality.
Dieyi, who plays Concubine Yu to Xiaolou's king, represents the old society of corrupt, but noble, decadence. Warped by abuse and betrayal, victimisation literally turns him in on himself, until he becomes homosexual in so many ways. The grim passivity, of which his homosexuality is only one facet, is bitter and snide on the one hand, but stoical and brave on the other. The suffering and ugliness that lies behind his elegant pristine act (as Concubine Yu) is like the hardship, toil and exploitation that was behind the old society (with its palaces and silk clothes created by the tired hands of the proletariat). Through combining both the ugliness and the beauty of the old society in one character, the film is able to justify it: the proletariat and the nobility are one, their suffering is one, and their triumph is one. This is forcefully iterated in the scene where communist pupils attack Dieyi's aesthetic preference for noble ambience on stage (beautiful backdrops portraying aristocratic gardens rather than proletariat metal pylons). We feel the injustice and hypocrisy of their ideology, for Dieyi is tougher than any of them; he has suffered and toiled harder than the most exploited slave in the history of mankind.
Where Xiaolou represents practical masculine reality, Dieyi represents art: he talks with a distanced air of finality and confuses the opera with everyday life. This is, for the most part, rooted in psychological realism. When Dieyi is beaten he refuses to cry because his artistic temperament detaches him from rationality and gives him a tragic-heroic identity which sustains him: to cry would be death for him. Xiaolou, on the other hand, chooses to grapple with reality and play up to the masters who beat him; he takes the lashings with comic defiance and exaggerated pleas for relief. The film only goes wrong when it becomes Dieyi's mouthpiece, condemning Xiaolou for betraying him. In the world of the film, it is no more fair to say that Dieyi is braver than Xiaolou than to say that Xiaolou survives where Dieyi perishes: within their own vital spheres, both prevail.
Xiaolou's wife, is a beautiful subtle portrayal of womanhood. From her beginnings as a whore (physically and emotionally) she grows in stature until she chrysalises into the film's most worthy character. The compassion and fortitude with which she tolerates her husband's operatic partnership with Dieyi, even when it is responsible for the loss of her unborn child, is heroic in a womanly sense (a kind of heroism rarely acknowledged in literature or film). Her pity for Dieyi outweighs her jealousy: she nurses him out of his heroin addiction as if she were his mother (his mother was, significantly, a prostitute from the same whorehouse as she). However, at the end, when the two of them have both been denounced by Xiaolou, the characterisation slips into sentimentality: instead of bearing Xiaolou's callousness with contempt (as she does when he hits her earlier) she gives up on life.
Like many of the greatest works of art, this film is flawed and it is the ending which reveals and embodies this flaw: sentimentality.