Farewell My Concubine: All the World’s a Stage

Throughout the film, Xiaolou and Dieyi repeatedly perform a climactic scene from the opera Farewell My Concubine, in which Xiang Yu, thwarted in his attempt to conquer China in the third century BCE, is surrounded by enemy soldiers. Despite his daring and strength, Xiang Yu finds himself cornered and desperate, accompanied by only a handful of followers and Lady Yu. While both history and other parts of the opera offer a more flawed portrait of Xiang Yu as impulsive and arrogant, this scene, in which he urges Lady Yu to save herself by leaving him, emphasizes his heroism, and the extent of his love for her. Lady Yu, in turn, shows her determination to remain faithful to him to the end, by dancing for him one last time before slitting her own throat.

This, along with other Beijing-opera scenes in the film, is a reminder of the continuity of Chinese tradition despite the swiftly changing face of history. Beijing opera was born in the late eighteenth century, deriving from older forms of Chinese opera, and telling even more ancient stories. The film’s historical sweep is panoramic, beginning in 1920s China during the warlord era and moving through Japan’s 1937 invasion of Beijing and its defeat in World War II, the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, the Communist victory, Mao’s death, and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. But through all these upheavals, Dieyi and Xiaolou perform the same movements and songs, their heavy makeup and padded costumes concealing signs of change like growth or aging.

By contrast, the settings and audiences for the performances shift rapidly. As children, the opera-school students perform for pennies on the streets. Dieyi and Xiaolou’s first big break occurs when they perform in a lavish garden compound for the eunuch Zhang, a servant of the last emperor. Later, they appear at a popular Beijing theater, but their audience shifts from passionate opera fans in traditional Chinese dress (like the wealthy opera patron Master Yuan) to uniformed Japanese soldiers, who drape the walls with rising-sun flags. When Dieyi and Xiaolou finally perform for the Communists, a large portrait of Chairman Mao dominates the stage. At last, the theater becomes a space for political struggle, as Xiaolou and Juxian sit in the crowd chanting slogans while Master Yuan is denounced onstage as a counterrevolutionary. Later in the film, Xiaolou himself is dragged onstage to be interrogated, the glaring spotlight now used to blind and pin him.

Visually, the opera performances also form a striking contrast to the world beyond the stage. A highly symbolic, almost ritualistic art form, Beijing opera eschews realistic sets and props; its actors perform in front of a simple backdrop. Chen often shoots opera scenes with a fixed camera to emphasize their static, two-dimensional quality. However, when he depicts the outside world—the opera school; Juxian’s brothel; the courtyards, houses, and streets of Old Beijing—his mobile camera creates a sense of luminous depth. Often he achieves this by shooting through doorways or windows, or with light sources within the frame, such as candles or fires, that cast shadows. Numerous scenes are filmed using filters, or through clouds of mist or smoke, to diffuse and soften the light. Sometimes the camera follows characters down alleys or passageways, revealing the labyrinthine wonders of the city. In many scenes, Chen fills the frame with restlessly moving crowds—of bystanders, protesters, or Red Guards—to suggest the teeming complexity and energy of life beyond the confines of the stage.

Mirroring the repeated opera scenes, the film’s soundtrack also uses the music of the opera as a recurrent motif in a rapidly shifting aural landscape. When Dieyi and Xiaolou perform, they are accompanied by traditional Chinese instruments, including gongs, drums, wooden clappers, the jinghu (a bowed string instrument similar to a violin), and the dizi (a wooden flute). Beginning with the Japanese invasion, a different, more modern palette of sounds intrudes on their world: angry shouts from protests and demonstrations, explosions and gunfire, the clatter of horses’ hooves and the barking of dogs, the staccato of radio news bulletins. There is music as well, but in the Western style of military marches and patriotic songs.

Interestingly, it is primarily during the scenes of Dieyi and Xiaolou’s childhood that the soundtrack uses nondiegetic music. This music, while distinct from the operas they perform, features the same instruments: for example, a vibrating gong at moments of confusion, the dizi at pensive moments, the piercing jinghu at moments of crisis. These instruments seem to lend the actors’ childhood the heightened drama and emotional intensity of their performances. Throughout the film, when something reminds Dieyi of his youth—whether reencountering Xiao Si, whom he had saved as a baby, or remembering, amid an opium haze, his mother—these same musical motifs poignantly recur. Leslie Cheung gives an extraordinarily nuanced performance as Dieyi, conveying the character’s vulnerability and isolation even at the height of his stardom. Cheung does not simply play Lady Yu; he plays Dieyi playing Lady Yu, always infusing the role with the different shades of Dieyi’s loneliness and longing.

Dieyi’s passionate wish to spend his whole life performing with Xiaolou, reliving and recreating their childhood days, creates the central conflict of the film, setting him at odds with Xiaolou, Juxian, and the shifting political environment around him. This wish seems difficult to understand, given the rigidity and savage violence of their opera training, which emphasizes unwavering fidelity to tradition over self-expression. Their teacher Master Guan beats them continually, using bricks and ropes to force their bodies into the desired forms. Since women are excluded from performing, Dieyi is brutally shaped to play female roles through a symbolic castration (the cutting off of his extra finger) and rape (Xiaolou thrusts a long metal pipe into Dieyi’s mouth repeatedly, leaving him bleeding). The opera students learn not just to accept the violence of their teachers but to inflict it on themselves (as when they slap their own faces) and on one another (as when Xiaolou assaults Dieyi with the pipe).

In fact, the violence of the Cultural Revolution, more than thirty years later, in many ways recalls the physical abuse of their childhood. When Xiaolou is interrogated for having mocked the Communist soldiers years before, he repeatedly slaps his own face to show his remorse. When he and Dieyi are paraded in the street and then denounced by the Red Guards, they are forced to kneel with their heads lowered and their arms twisted behind their backs, recalling how, as children, they were made to kneel while balancing a basin on their heads as punishment.

Indeed, even though the Cultural Revolution was supposed to purge China’s ancient traditions and usher in a new order, numerous echoes between the first and second halves of the film suggest that the “old society” and “new society” may be more similar than they seem. Despite Communism’s promises of class and gender equality, Juxian is still reviled for her sex work, just as Dieyi’s mother had been decades earlier. Like Dieyi and Xiaolou’s childhood classmate Laizi, Juxian hangs herself—both figures so powerless that suicide feels like their only possible form of protest. More and more, the new society seems not the antithesis but rather a mirror image of the old, with the same groupthink and submission to authority.

However, there is one striking difference between the old and new societies. Despite, or perhaps because of, the brutality of their training, as children Dieyi and Xiaolou are unfailingly loyal to each other, calling each other “brother,” tending to each other’s injuries, and shielding each other from blame. When Dieyi is being flogged mercilessly for running away, Xiaolou even attacks Master Guan to protect him. The old society was ordered by the five Confucian relations: between sovereign and subject, between father and son, between husband and wife, between brothers, and between friends. After all, this theme of enduring social bonds is at the center of the oft-repeated opera scene in Farewell My Concubine, in which Lady Yu remains with Xiang Yu at a dangerous crisis, even as he urges her to save herself.

By contrast, when Dieyi and Xiaolou are denounced during the Cultural Revolution, the onetime brothers turn against each other, spilling secrets and accusations in front of a seething crowd. Xiaolou also cruelly rejects the faithful Juxian, driving her to her suicide. Such betrayals became all too common during the Cultural Revolution, as family members were pressured to inform against one another, in order to prove their devotion to Chairman Mao and the state.

Years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Dieyi brings the knowledge of these betrayals to his and Xiaolou’s final performance of Farewell My Concubine, now set, incongruously, in a sports arena. Their makeup, movements, and singing are the same as they have always been, but now Dieyi, always more insightful than Xiaolou, finally sees the complexities and contradictions beneath the opera, the violence and suffering behind such heroic tales, the impossible choices that women face. For the first time in his life, he makes his performance truly his own.