Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine

CHAPTER 23 THE USES OF HISTORY: CHEN KAIGE’S FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE Milan Kundera once made a helpful distinction between two sorts of novels set in the past. There is, on the one hand, “the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation … popularizations that translate non-novelistic knowledge into the language of the novel,” and, on the other hand, the novel that examines “the historical dimension of human existence” (36). In the first case, cardboard cutouts are wheeled out to represent “the bourgeoisie” or “the last throes of imperialism”— in other words, important social tendencies in the historical scheme of things rather than individualized or self-determined human beings. Here, the background effectively replaces the foreground. In the second case, history is only one part of a multifaceted portrayal of characters whose lives are inevitably and decisively, but not reductively, shaped by larger public events. In this sort of novel, that is, social institutions are presented in the form of complex human relationships; complex human relationships are not reduced to mere social symbols or signposts. Here, the background and the foreground bleed into each other at the same time that each retains its separate identity. What Kundera says about the novel is transferable to its visual equivalent or rendition, the cinema, and all the more so in the case of movies that have been adapted from fiction, like Farewell, My Concubine (1993). This film is set in the past; deals with issues of war, politics, class, and sexuality; and has inspired diametrically opposed interpretations following Kundera’s scheme. On the one hand, there are those who believe that the confusion of sexual identity and of art and life in Farewell, My Concubine is a stunning metaphor for the identity crisis of China itself as it moves from the era of warlord rule (after the complete collapse of the Ching imperial dynasty in 1924) to the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1976; while others find that Chen Kaige’s fifth film appears to want simultaneously— and disastrously—to root its story in the historical process and to abstract its main characters from that process, to represent them ahistorically or existentially and thus nearly disconnect the foreground from the background. I propose to sort out these conflicting views, which are to some extent my own, in what follows. Sexuality would appear to be at the heart of Farewell, My Concubine, which won the top prize at the 1993 Cannes Festival (the first Chinese film to do so) and which, because it combustibly mixes politics with sexuality, has been censored in its native land. Bouts with the censor are nothing new for Fifth-Generation filmmakers like Chen Kaige—so called because they belonged to the fifth class to graduate from 213 Chapter 23 the Beijing Film Academy, in 1982—since he and his fellow artists are the first in the Communist era to make movies that do not toe a socialist-realist line, that do not spew out Party propaganda as a matter of course. Chen is among the best known of these directors, who include Zhang Yimou (the cinematographer for Chen’s first two films), Zhang Nuanxin, Hu Mei, Peng Xiaolian, and Tian Zhuangzhuang (whose Blue Kite [1994], like Farewell, My Concubine, chronicles the political and social upheavals that culminated in China’s Cultural Revolution). Chen’s fifth film has recognizable roots in his previous four, especially The Big Parade (1986), but it also differs from them in attempting to supply the historical and cultural perspective needed to make sense of its human drama—something that such aesthetically refined allegories as his King of the Children (1988) and Life on a String (1991) did not do. Farewell, My Concubine covers much the same historical territory as The Last Emperor (in which Chen Kaige had a cameo role), Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 film about the life of China’s last imperial ruler from his ascension to the throne as a little boy in 1908 to his death in 1967 as an ordinary citizen of Mao’s People’s Republic. But Chen’s movie takes a far less benign view of the Communist “reinvention” of Chinese society than Bertolucci’s does; and it focuses on the lives of two men who are famous for playing a king and his concubine in an eighteenth-century opera, rather than on the lives of king and concubine themselves (and the last emperor, Pu Yi, had at least two mistresses, one of them a bisexual). The film’s title is taken from that musical drama, in which concubine Yu is so loyal that rather than abandon the King of Chu as he faces military defeat, she chooses to dance for him one last time and then to cut her throat with his sword. Duan Xiaolou plays the king and Cheng Dieyi his lover in this favorite work from the repertory of the Peking Opera, the form of theater that dominated the Chinese stage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when spoken drama had not yet come into existence; and a form of theater in which female roles are performed by males. David Henry Hwang used the cross-gender casting of the Peking Opera, together with the cultural stereotyping of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), as the basis for an exploration of sexual fantasy and racial mythology in his play M. Butterfly (1988), made into a graceless film by David Cronenberg in 1993. Now Chen Kaige uses the Opera’s cross-gender casting to a different, panoramically historical and discursively political end in Farewell, My Concubine, itself adapted from the 1985 novel by Hong-Kong author Lilian Lee (who collaborated with Lu Wei to write the screenplay). Xiaolou and Dieyi meet as boys in 1925 when both are apprenticed to Guan Jifa’s rigorous, in truth tyrannical, Peking Opera Academy, the latter youth by a prostitute who is no longer able to raise him. Effeminate and pretty, frail and six-fingered on one hand (the extra finger must be chopped off before Guan will aceept the boy), Douzi—as he is called before adopting the stage name of Cheng Dieyi—appears to be a freak of nature, a girl inside what is literally a boy’s body. Yet he is soon shown being forced against his will to train for female roles. “I am by nature a boy,” Douzi insists until he is beaten into submission. In fact “by nature,” as well as by means of 214.

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