Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 19, 1994 TAG: 9403190111
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
They are, "Who are you?" and they are sent like guided missiles at a pair of opera performers - Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) - standing in full costume, the king and his concubine, at the spotlit center of a nearly empty theater.
The struggle to answer that question, the conflict between art and life, is central to the story of Xiaolou and Dieyi, raised since boyhood to be opera performers. It is a painful and sometimes beautiful struggle to observe.
Their story begins in black-and-white flashback in Beijing, 1924, where Cheng's mother is bustling through the crowded streets with her small son in her arms. She wants him to be taken into a school for opera students, run by an almost unbelievably sadistic master-teacher who delivers an imaginative variety of punishments to his troupe while intoning such wisdom as, "Only pigs and dogs don't listen to opera."
Cheng's mother delivers her own shocking blow so that her son can be admitted to this performers' sweatshop, and that first blow sets the tone for a lifetime of cruelties, nearly always perpetrated by those closest to Cheng.
At the school, Cheng and Duan meet, forge a bond and take on the roles they will play for a lifetime. Duan is the King Chu, Cheng his Concubine Yu. At first, Cheng struggles with the notion that he is female on stage, consistently muffing the important line: "I am by nature a girl." As long as he is right about it in his head, he is wrong about it in rehearsal. Finally forced by Duan to get it right - with blood pouring from his mouth - Cheng cannot turn back, and the inevitabilities of the story begin to present themselves.
Once Cheng begins to believe that he is what he plays, he becomes a star. As his patron Yuan leeringly notes the first time he sees Cheng perform, "Has he not blurred the barrier?"
Duan, as his King, enjoys the fruits of their successful partnership, but does not blur the barrier. He, in fact, likes women and eventually decides to marry the prostitute Juxian (Gong Li).
The conflict becomes obvious: There is no room for Duan's real life - or any real life for that matter - in the operatic fantasy that Cheng lives. As time goes on and the events of Chinese history encroach more and more on the lives of the insulated little Beijing Opera Company, Cheng and Duan betray each other and Juxian to survive in a world that has seemed to move beyond an understanding of the personal and the individually heroic.
At 2 hours and 37 minutes, "Farewell My Concubine" avoids the pitfalls of many films that have history as a central character. There are few broad brush strokes, and director Kaige keeps the scenes short. But it is because he allows the humanity of the characters to always have center stage that he has managed to produce an epic of human proportions.
Because, after all, as Cheng and Duan discover, the stage is no match for life when it comes to tragedy.
Farewell My Concubine *** 1/2
Distributed by Miramax and playing at the Grandin Theater. Rated R for some violence and profanity. 157 minutes.
by CNB