Farewell My Concubine

Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine is a moving historical melodrama whose occasional excess is worth tolerating for its three central performances. It follows two opera performers through decades of Chinese political upheaval, with their unequal attachment becoming harder to separate from the work they share. Cheng Dieyi loves Duan Xiaolou, and the arrival of Juxian makes the limits of that relationship harder to ignore. Chen gives this triangle 171 minutes, allowing private disappointments to accumulate while the world around the performers keeps changing.

Leslie Cheung makes Dieyi’s devotion troubling enough that we cannot simply congratulate him for being faithful. His love places demands on Xiaolou that a shared life on stage cannot satisfy, and Cheung makes that frustration matter more than the scale of the events surrounding it. We were moved by the unreturned love, because the continuing partnership gives Dieyi so much reason to hope. Zhang Fengyi’s Xiaolou feels less consumed by the bond, which is exactly what makes their scenes together hurt.

Gong Li’s Juxian deserves equal attention, and her performance makes the description of a woman coming between two men sound inadequate. She has a claim to happiness too, however inconvenient that is for Dieyi. Lilian Lee Bik-Wah and Lu Wei’s screenplay, adapted from Lee’s novel, is most persuasive when it lets all three want things the others cannot give. Gong keeps Juxian from becoming merely an obstacle for Dieyi; her own disappointment matters, and the performance makes us take it seriously.

Gu Changwei’s cinematography gives the opera enough splendour to explain why these men devote their lives to it. The production design by Yang Yu-He and Yang Zhanjia, with costumes by Chen Changmin, makes the stage feel like somewhere a person could learn exactly how to behave. That certainty makes the confusion between the three leads more painful. The visual richness also allows us to enjoy their profession for its own sake, which matters in a film where the people doing it have so much to endure.

Pei Xiaonan’s editing keeps the long chronology moving, and the film rarely feels stranded between its major events. The cost is that an emotional change can seem hurried along to make room for the next historical pressure. The music, credited to Jonathan Lee and Zhao Jiping, presses the sorrow hard; we would occasionally prefer less encouragement when the actors have already made the hurt clear. The film remains absorbing, but a little more time for the three leads and a little less musical insistence would help.

Chen is working in a form that welcomes large emotions, and judging a historical melodrama for being melodramatic would miss much of its pleasure. The reservation is that the screenplay sometimes arranges personal distress and political turmoil so neatly that we can feel ourselves being prompted. For most of the running time, the actors make those pressures convincing, and the opera gives the film something worth caring about beyond the next misfortune. Set aside the full evening, and choose it when you have patience for a film that does not leave its unhappy people alone.