ASIA: CHINA & TAIWAN: FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, THE WEDDING BANQUET
© Sean Gallagher
FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE is one of those stories that attempts an intimate tale - a love triangle - set against an epic one. Here, the epic tale is the changing of China, from the Japanese invasion to the Communist takeover and the Cultural revolution. What makes the intimate tale slightly different is it's a man and a woman in love with the same man. In a sense, though, this should be a familiar story in that it has noble suffering and is a film easier admired than liked.
The sufferers here are Douzi (Leslie Cheung) and Shitou (Zhang Fengyi). As boys, they were both sold to the Peking Opera company to learn how to be singers. Douzi particularly had it bad as his mother, a prostitute, cut off his sixth finger (a birth defect) to get him into the school. The most well-known of the stories they rehearse is the one about the king and his concubine. Since this is an all-boys school, effeminate-looking boys like Douzi take on the role of the concubine, while the more burly Shitou gets the king role. Since Shitou is the only boy at school who stands up for Douzi, and since they work well together on stage, the two become friends. But Douzi has stronger feelings than that.
Time passes. Shitou and Douzi start touring and become quite popular. Shitou becomes involved with Juxian (Gong Li), a prostitute, and Douzi becomes jealous and breaks up the partnership. When Shitou is captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, however, Juxian manages to prevail on Douzi to use the goodwill he has with the Japanese to get Shitou released. Because of this, Douzi is later denounced as a collaborator. He also gets raped, and enters a relationship with an older man where he still has to play an effeminate role. Then the Communists take over, and with them comes the cultural revolution, where no art done for art's sake can be good - which, of course, flies in the face of what Douzi has loved and learned to embrace. And this brings out the greatest tension between Shitou and Douzi, as Shitou outs Douzi, while Douzi denounces Juxian as a prostitute.
