Trying and failing to tackle Farewell My Concubine

Around the time that I wrote a bunch of film reviews for my school magazine (none of which were published), I tried to write one about Farewell My Concubine. It was very difficult. I gave up. There are big films, like this one, like Ashes of Time, that I find very difficult to articulate my feelings about. Nevertheless, I just checked my document and found out I'd written a lot more than I thought. I'm putting it here, unedited, but it's very unpolished, and I think if I had to write about it I wouldn't approach it from there anymore.

There are many different ways to approach this film. It's just too large. I could write a book about it. For this half-baked review, I guess I was going to focus on the historical epic aspect to it. But the gender aspect is also very major.

Anyway, here goes...

For as long as the filmographic medium has existed, it has been used to chronicle historical events. Whether it is created in real time as reportage or whether it is used to reconstruct the past, its specific ability to accommodate the basic human concepts of time and space has allowed it to become a format through which audiences can live and re-live certain moments that we would otherwise forget. We as a species can be an absent-minded bunch, often misplacing things – keys, glasses, memories. We shrug off the things that we have lost, allowing the thought of them to dissipate in the wind, but, as time goes on and we commit atrocious mistakes, we have realised that, no matter how much tempting it is to never speak about certain events again, there are some things that we must never forget.

In this sense, Farewell My Concubine (Bawang Bie Ji) is quite possibly the most significant Chinese film to ever have been made.

Made in 1993 by famous director Chen Kaige, it stars Zhang Fengyi, Gong Li, and the late Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing in a piece that remains the only Chinese-language film to win the Cannes Palme d’Or. It is often grouped with other Fifth Generation Chinese films like The Blue Kite (1993) and To Live (1994), but distinguishes itself from them in the way that it combines age-old tradition with contemporary modernity, as well as in its breadth and depth and the questions it helps to raise about the fluidity of gender and sexuality in a nation that may be advancing too quickly for its own good. This film is massive in scale, spanning 53 years in total – this may seem like a small timeframe at first, but when one considers how dizzyingly and chaotically China has evolved in the past century, fifty-three years seems like millenia. Swiftly, flowingly, almost nonchalantly – like the decisive swoop of a calligraphy brush – it shows the audience the turmoil of 20th century China. It does not beg, nor threaten, nor weep, nor seek attention. It simply allows us to consider and reflect as we observe the ups and downs in the ultimately tragic fate of a Beijing opera troupe.

The film reads like a book bound with human-skin leather –– the cries of an anguished nation resonate throughout. In the same way that the front and back covers of a book are really one piece of material, the first scene is also the last: set a dusty, desolate gymnasium filled with nothing but emptiness and echoes. It is 1977, and two opera singers are practicing their most famous act: Farewell My Concubine. It tells a 200 BC tale of the Hegemon-King of the state of Western Chu named Xiang Yu, engaged in a civil war against Liu Bang, who would go on to found the Han dynasty. As Xiang Yu is surrounded by enemy troops and realises that he is doomed to die, he desperately tries to persuade his lover, Consort Yu Miaoji, to flee for her life. She refuses, and takes her own life with his sword in order to remain with him in death. The story is millenia old, but it’s wrought with everlasting grief. In the dark, wide room in post-Cultural Revolution China, the two actors stand with their back to the door. The light – white, glowing, fleetingly phosphorescent – casts their shadows into the expanse ahead – long, thin, stretched, tired.

How long has it been since we last saw one another?

Ten years, one says.

Eleven, the other retorts.

Eleven, the first agrees.

And then the fast staccato percussion sounds of the traditional opera begin to resonate, and we are plunged back into the depths of the past.