Farewell my concubine - Essay Example

History and Political Science: Farewell My Concubine. The Chinese language film Farewell My Concubine starts with an image of two men on stage, dressed in the very ornate costumes of the Beijing Opera. This recalls the ancient storytelling and singing arts of China which go back many centuries. It is clear that they are both wealthy and successful artists who are idolized by the audience. The main storyline of the film is a flashback to previous episodes in the lives of the two adult actors. It tells the story of how they grew up through some of the most turbulent years in China’s long history.

The two boys Shitou and Douzi are handed over by their parents to live in a strict training school for the opera in Beijing. The regime there is very harsh, and the boys are trained to perform very stylized roles which require heavy makeup and rigid types of characterization. Douzi is chosen to perform female characters, which involves him training his voice to sound like a woman, and repeating a very significant line which states that he is a girl by nature and not a boy. He has difficulty getting the words out, and repeatedly stumbles over that line, saying that he is a boy and not a girl.

He is beaten and punished for this mistake, and the violence of his teacher is a way of showing how forceful communism came to be. The repressive era of the Cultural Revolution in the period between 1966 and 1976 forced people to conform to a rigid moral and social code of behavior, and punished people who resisted by beating them or banishing them to distant places, or even prisons. The training of the boys and the effect it had upon them is a kind of metaphor for the way that China suffered under the Cultural Revolution.

The film shows how the two boys grow up to identify with people who are outcasts and oppressed. They take on different names, signifying how they have been transformed by their harsh training, and these names are from classical literature, signifying a male and female couple Xiaolou and Dieyye. Both of them fall in love with a beautiful prostitute called Junxing. Under communism actors and prostitutes are accorded very low status, and yet the film shows the complex tensions between the three of them.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the way that Dieyye struggles with the two personas he has developed – the original manly one that he was born with, and the later feminized persona that he uses for the stage. His sadness is that he can find love in neither place, and the moral of the film seems to be that forceful re-education does not work. It may create the desired outward effect, but the inner struggle of the man, and by implication of the country as well, is to express the true inner nature (ancient culture) despite the overlay of acquired skills (modern communism).

The film was banned in China on its release, largely because it was critical of the Maoist regime, but it enjoyed tremendous success across the world. References Kaige, Chen, (Dir.) Farewell My Concubine. Film starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi and Gong Li based on the novel by Lillian Lee. Hong Kong: Miramax films, 1993.