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Not since Lawrence of Arabia has a film so successfully fused the personal with the epic, the grand drama of history with the melodrama of personal lives. And I use the word "melodrama" in the best sense - not as a pejorative for excessive affect, but in its older meaning, to connote an emotional story distilled to its most potent, primal form.
Although it is easy (and not entirely incorrect) to assign significance to the subtext of sexual repression in China (sex and sexual abuse in many forms underlies nearly every important development in the film), it is only a small part of a much larger design. Modern China's identity crisis runs far deeper than the film's surface themes. It is a reflection of a larger human failing to find social and moral codes that work. From before the Second World War to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, China and her people were whipsawed between various brands of hedonism and oppression, individualism with its attendant chaos and tyrannical conformity with its rigidly enforced social order. In the Dickensian story of two orphaned boys forced into servitude with a Beijing Opera troupe, it finds an uncanny metaphor in their struggle for personal identity, and against the repression of their own natures imposed by both internal and external forces.
Shitou is reared from childhood to play the king in the highly stylized traditional opera from which the film takes its title. He is by nature a sensualist, drinker, womanizer, and scoundrel. He has also been molded, initially quite against his will, in the role of a celebrity - a beloved star and public face of China's high culture. His girlfriend Juxian (Gong Li) is a prostitute, to whom he almost accidentally proposes, making her (and himself) "legitimate" to the masses when he marries her.
Douzi is his acting partner, a homosexual who plays the role of the king's suicidal concubine in the same opera. As in Elizabethan England, only men were traditionally allowed on-stage, so, in a sense, Douzi's role was also forced upon him - although the film strongly suggests that his sexuality was more a matter of nature than nurture (he was born with an extra finger, to symbolize that he was always "different" from the others). Ironically, he must hide his true sexual orientation from an adoring public, even as the unrequited love for his co-star brilliantly informs his performance as the concubine.
As we follow the men's struggles throughout China's tumultuous journey into the modern world, it becomes apparent that they have accepted and even embraced the roles that were initially foisted upon them by circumstance. We come to realize that they may very well have chosen them, had they been given the freedom to do so. At the center is the romantic triangle between Shitou, Douzi, and Juxian.
All of which brilliantly sets the stage for one of the saddest third acts in cinema, in which the lines between free will and determinism, the necessity of circumstance and the will of the inner self, will blur, cross, and cross again. Each of the three main characters will betray and publicly denounce the others in order to survive, will claim allegiance to one revolution or another, and perhaps even mean it for a time, to stay the hands of the revolutionaries, whose shifting ideologies by turns celebrate and threaten each of them.
In lesser hands such a story would be trite, morbid, and - well - melodramatic, in the bad sense of the word. But director Chen Kaige has a unique personal connection with the material, in that he denounced his own father during the Cultural Revolution - an act which he bitterly regretted later. It is therefore with sympathy and genuine compassion that he tells his tale, rather than cheap sentiment or maudlin histrionics.
When made poorly a tale like this is insufferably turgid, awash with treacly tears. When made well - with care, precision, and truth - it is breathtaking.
This is my favorite Chinese film.
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Top reviews from other countries
Squarepusher Fan
Dieses grandiöse Film ist schwierig zu bekommen
Reviewed in Germany on February 3, 2023
joel
Brilliant! Very entertaining. Fast delivery, perfect.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2024