ASIA: CHINA & TAIWAN: FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, THE WEDDING BANQUET
Kaige's film has been described as an epic, and it certainly looks it. The colors of the film are astounding, and Kaige knows how to film both crowd scenes and more intimate scenes. And writers Lilian Lee and Wei Lu (adapting the novel by Lee) know how to condense Chinese history enough to make it understood in the film without trivializing it. But sometimes, you get the feeling Kaige is indulging in old movie suffering rather than real suffering. Cheung, a good actor, seems to often go the Joan Crawford route of being the martyr, and being ennobled by his suffering. This sort of limits the complex journey Douzi has to take. Plus, it seems a little unbelievable that the Communists would on the one hand denounce the opera and yet still see them only as the king and concubine. Fengyi has a strong presence as Shitou, and Li, best known at the time as Zhang Yimou's frequent collaborator, is terrific once again as Juxian, showing a woman who's much more than just an ex-prostitute. Still, FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE ends up being one of those films you admire more than like.
Wang's adaptation of Amy Tan's best-selling novel (adapted by Tan and Ronald Bass) was hailed as a breakthrough for giving so many Asian-American actresses major roles, both older and younger. While this is certainly true and certainly good, it would be nice if the movie came off as more than just a worthy soap opera (a problem which also plagues FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE). Still, it's often affecting.
The film takes place at a going away party, where June (Ming-Na Win) is the one going away. She's going to visit China to see her two long-lost sisters, who were abandoned by their late mother Suyuan (Kieu Chinh). How that happened is one of the many stories interwoven during the party. We also get the story of June's aunts (actually, close personal friends) Lindo (Tsai Chin), Ying Ying (Frances Nyuyen), and An Mei (Lisa Lu), and their respective daughters Waverly (Tamilyn Tomita), Lena (Lauren Tom), and Rose (Rosalind Chao). As with the novel, this is all a string of memory stories, as, after June tells her and her mother's story, one mother remembers her story, and then we get her daughter's story.
Each of the mother's go through hardship, growing up in China. Lindo, for example, had to deal with a sexless marriage to a foolish
Latest Articles