Chen Kaige’s drama makes its long span of Chinese history painfully personal, with Leslie Cheung giving its troubled relationships their force. The plotting sometimes pushes too hard, but the performances warrant all 171 minutes.
Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine is absorbing enough to justify its 171 minutes, even when the plotting pushes too hard. It follows two Peking Opera performers through decades of Chinese upheaval, asking what happens to a partnership when the people in it want different things. They cannot easily keep their feelings out of their work, and Chen gives that difficulty time to become painful. He lets us understand why these people remain attached to one another even when they are making one another unhappy.
The early opera-training sequences establish what becoming a performer costs. We were horrified by the brutality towards the children, because the suffering is treated as an ordinary part of learning an art. The film makes it difficult to enjoy the accomplished performances later without remembering how that accomplishment is produced. Chen gives the training enough attention that it continues to trouble us when there are other things happening on screen.
Leslie Cheung’s Cheng Dieyi is the strongest reason to keep watching. Cheung makes Dieyi’s attachment to his partner seem so necessary to him that his difficult behaviour remains comprehensible, even when it is hard to forgive. Zhang Fengyi’s Duan Xiaolou seems more able to separate the partnership from the rest of his life, and the difference makes their scenes together hurt. Zhang gives Cheung plenty to respond to without making Xiaolou’s feelings conveniently match Dieyi’s.
Gong Li’s Juxian could easily have been treated as an inconvenience in a story about two men. Gong makes that reading difficult by giving Juxian’s wants the same weight as theirs. She makes her claims on their shared life seem reasonable, even when they put the partnership under strain. The screenplay by Lu Wei and Lilian Lee Bik-Wah is strongest in this close, unhappy company, where understanding another person’s pain does not prevent anyone from adding to it.
Gu Changwei’s cinematography gives the opera performances a richness that helps us understand why the characters remain committed to their work. Chen Changmin’s costumes make that commitment visible in the care of their stage appearance. Production designers Yang Yu-He and Yang Zhanjia give the theatre a similar pull, although the beauty can sometimes make these unhappy lives look too carefully arranged. The film needs the attraction of performance to be persuasive, and these crafts make it so.
Pei Xiaonan’s editing keeps the long story moving, but the screenplay sometimes presses the characters through one crisis before we have absorbed the last. This is where the historical sweep starts to feel cramped, despite the running time. The music, credited to Jonathan Lee and Zhao Jiping, can add more emotional weight than the performances need. These stretches would benefit from less insistence, because Chen has already given us ample reason to care.
Within historical melodrama, Chen’s film stands out for treating private jealousy as seriously as public danger. Its characters would have enough difficulty living together even in a country that left them alone. Set aside the full evening, and do not choose it when anyone needs cheering up.
