colin### wrote:Incidentally that may be why you should not be surprised if you do not hear too much about the homosexual desire aspect of this film, or it gets played down in the features on the disc, because Chen Kaige publicly disavowed that it was a film about unrequited gay desire. Which may be surprising to Western eyes due to that aspect being almost impossible not to notice, and which was often the aspect being celebrated by international critics at festivals (the same way that Zhang Yimou’s run of classics with Gong Li could be seen as feminist works, if you somewhat overlook the idea that they are also mostly gloriously romantic tragedies about those 'tall poppies' who stand out also inevitably being crushed by the unassailable, and unquestionable regime). However there has recently been the CCPs official condemnation of ‘sissypants’ beautiful young men (only made harder to deal with in recent years by the relentless assault on Chinese shores of an influx of pretty boy K-Pop singers!) as softening the moral values of the fighting men of the country, which makes talking about homosexuality somewhat of a taboo there.
However in some ways by scraping away that ‘superficial’ aspect about gay desire it may accidentally end up making Farewell, My Concubine into an even more subversive film! Because it then more obviously becomes a political statement about how people are forced into taking on roles in their society not because they may particularly want (or desire) to, but because that has been deemed to be their position. What can you put up with? Are you constrained by the life you are born into, no matter how much you wish it were different? You’re groomed from childhood to be the concubine in the production now, and will always be the girl and not the lover, just the ersatz stage-bound ultimate figure of female desire playing against the macho man (who himself was and is inescapably fixed forever into the role of the aloof and somewhat brusquely uncaring Royal) until the ‘real’ woman comes along: you just have to live with it until there is nothing of the ‘real you’ left, and only the role remains to express your desires. If they truly are ‘yours’ and not more properly those of the character you have lived your entire life impersonating.
Tsui's
Peking Opera Blues suggests that historically there was a culture in China of men publicly wooing the female stars, ie. they wooed the male actors who customarily played the female roles. There's a whole subplot about that, which is played for laughs, but not because it's gay. It's played for the exact laughs it would get if the male-as-female actor were simply a popular female actor who has to avoid the amorous affections of an ugly rich patron. And in general no one in the movie treats this situation as strange or even registers that the actor is question is male; they treat the actor as socially female and navigating a traditionally feminine situation. Overall, the movie gives the impression there was significant social and personal bleed between actor and role in the Peking Opera, that the nominally male actors who specialized in female roles were also treated socially and culturally as women. (This is good context for one of the three main characters, a woman who likes to wear male dress both because it gets her taken more seriously, but also because she just seems to like it. Late in the film she will adopt more feminine clothes for a scene, but treats it as play and the clothes as a costume).
So while
Farewell My Concubine is undoubtably queer, and I believe Leslie Cheung was even out at this point, I could see Chen not making the film with modern gender identity in mind. It does seem to be playing with the same social and cultural norms we see in
Peking Opera Blues, that slippage between actor and mask that turned male actors into women both on and off stage.
Funnily, just the year before
Farewell My Concubine saw the release of
Swordsman II, which was a big hit in Hong Kong (and maybe China as well?) precisely because of the popularity of the Brigitte Lin chararacter, a man who castrates himself for ultimate power and spends the narrative not just slowly transforming into a woman, but embracing and luxuriating in her growing femininity, even carrying on a romance with Jet Li. The character was so popular it not only became a role played ever since by female actors when it had traditionally been a role for males, but also spawned a 1993 sequel centred on the character,
The East is Red, which doubles down on the themes of gender and identity to produce a fantasia of shifting, mutable identities, gender and otherwise. No doubt there were a lot of straight cis men who kinda, sorta wished they could wake up one morning looking like Brigitte Lin.
And then there are traditional Chinese stories like
The Butterfly Loves, later adapted by Tsui into a wonderful movie, that's about a woman seeking an education by cross-dressing as a man and falling in love with one of their fellow students. I haven't seen Stanley Kwan's documentary
Yang ± Yin yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if he goes into all this. There seems to be a lot in Chinese culture that bends traditional ideas of gender and makes that nominally heteronormative society seem a lot less hetero.
Farewell My Concubine, whether intended as queer in the modern sense or not, is plainly engaging with that bending in an upfront way. It's a shame Chen felt the need to distance himself. He can, after all, simply claim it's traditional!
