Crushing almost sixty years of twentieth-century turmoil into less run time than the equally decade-skippy first season of HBO's House of the Dragon, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine joins the Criterion Collection this week in a new 4K transfer.
The film was the first Chinese feature to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes, but was later banned, then censored, then banned again in its home country. It remains a bravura act of filmmaking, which fuses two men's personal longings to the end of China's Imperial era and the devastation of the Cultural Revolution.
The first hour is exquisite, if agonizing. Young Douzi -- already so androgynous as to be easily mistaken for girlish, with bright red ribbons in his hair -- is given by his mother to a Beijing opera training school, as he has become too old to be safely raised in the brothel where she works. Lost and out of place, Douzi is quickly taken under the wing of a tough older boy at the school, Shitou.
The abuse they suffer at the hands of their instructors both bonds them and, as we will see, short-circuits their ability to live unburdened by their shared past. The pair quickly become inseparable in both art and misadventure, and are trained together to play the lead roles in the opera, Farewell My Concubine. Shitou will play the heroic male lead; Douzi, naturally feminine, will be the concubine, a female role.
Here we arrive at the unnameable catch: to Shitou, Farewell My Concubine is a work of art that he and his "brother" perform to greater and greater success. To Douzi, though, it's something else: an imaginary enactment of his life, his gender, and his devotion to Shitou, as he truly feels it.
Whether Douzi would prefer to be a woman is only toyed with (he frequently makes an unconscious pronoun swap, when reciting a critical verse). As to whether he is in love with Shitou, such a thing can never be uttered aloud. The latter, however, becomes inescapable as the pair move into adulthood.
Now performing Farewell My Concubine to great acclaim, the adult Shitou and Douzi (now played by Zhang Fenyi and the late Leslie Cheung) must now endure the Japanese invasion of China and the subsequent communist revolution following World War II, all while Douzi finds himself the unwelcome third point of a love triangle, as Shitou marries Juxian (Gong Li) and settles into a "normal" life.
The political pressure on their shared art form becomes just as, if not more so, immense. The communist takeover of the country and, later, Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution strip away Douzi and Shitou's allies, privileges, and cultural capital. Douzi's unrequited love becomes a ravenous need for an artistic imaginary that becomes more and more difficult to access.
The restoration of Farewell My Concubine for this release is among the finest I've seen in the Criterion Collection. Presented in HDR-10 only (along with a 5.1 surround DTS-HD soundtrack), Chen Kaige's superb use of atmospherics (smoke, candlelight) to create depth maintains its painterly quality in 4K. Kaige interweaves two visual languages throughout the film; inside the Beijing opera, backgrounds are diffuse and the camera remains still, while outside, it roams almost frenetically, portraying historic Beijing as an endless, unfolding geometry of spaces that go on to collapse as the decades wear on.
Colours on the disc are bright and realistic without becoming vivid or garish. Framed against the "old-fashioned" backdrops of the opera, Douzi's white face paint and bright pink highlights (genuinely, the look I've been looking for in my own makeup) seems to glow.
Later, when Douzi and Shitou are being witch-hunted by Maoist tribunals, Kaige frames the feminine singer -- still in his concubine makeup -- beyond the roaring flames of a nearby bonfire, as the lines of his immaculate white-and-pink colouration, finally, begin to smear and melt. As the indignities visited upon Chinese tradition unravel the only pure world that Douzi can reside within, the character himself seems to liquefy.
The Criterion release packs two archival features, along with one piece of new production. From the archives, we have a 22-minute featurette on the making of the film, produced in 2003, and presented, rather remarkably, in letterboxed pan-and-scan, in case you wanted to show your kids what that used to look like. There's also an erudite Charlie Rose interview with Kaige himself, from all the way back in 1993.
Newly produced is a 35-minute conversation between Michael Berry and Janet Yang, about fifth-generation Chinese cinema and Chen Kaige's place within it, along with his contemporaries such as Zhang Yimou and Zhang Junzhao. Also discussed is the journey of Lilian Lee's novel to the screen, including the decisions Lee, Kaige and screenwriter Lu Wei made to beef up Juxian's role to give the film's core relationships greater weight.
Positioning desire as the key fulcrum of both personal identity and the artistic impulse, and then setting that desire against the brute force of political change and ever-faster-moving time, Farewell My Concubine's most sublime visual idea may well have been unintentional, but I noted it nonetheless: at no point are Leslie Cheung and Zhang Fenyi "aged up," even though they play Douzi and Shitou across over 40 years of their lives. They seem to remain constant, a fixed point, from the start of the picture to their last bow.
The film is now available for purchase from the official Criterion site in separate editions: 4K+Blu-ray (2 discs) and Blu-ray (one disc).
See also: James Marsh's review of the BFI Blu-ray from 2016.