Review of Farewell My Concubine / 霸王别姬, directed by Chen Kaige

There are some movies that will stick with you forever, especially when it comes to the way you watched them. When I was an undergraduate at FIT in New York City, I took a Contemporary Chinese Cinema course as a requirement for my honors program (we had to take a class in the honors program every single semester to stay in good standing).

One of the movies we watched in the class our professor told us was a movie her Chinese students had insisted she screened in the past, and it was Farewell My Concubine. When the lights came back on at the end of the movie, my friends and I turned to each other and agreed this was one of the best movies we had ever seen.

And many years later, I had never forgotten that. I was in New York covering the New York Film Festival in 2023 when I saw Farewell My Concubine had been restored in 4k and was screening at the Film Forum.

I bought a ticket almost immediately and planned to go straight after the screening of May December, but that was the day Brooklyn flooded. I missed my NYFF screenings that day but somehow made it to Film Forum by 7:30, and man I relived the magic of this movie all over again.

Here’s my review.

A Beijing Opera performer finds himself split between his on-stage and real life persona in the midst of cultural turmoil.

The film begins with the events that lead Cheng Dieyi, known at the beginning of the movie as Douzi, to becoming the person he was. We actually open with a scene that we return to in the end: an adult Dieyi dances in the midst of an opera performance with Xiaolou.

But in the past, during the early twenties, Dieyi/Douzi’s mother is a prostitute and she no longer can keep him at the house with her. She begs the sadistic owner of the local Chinese opera troupe to take him in, but he denies her due to his extra finger. Dieyi’s mother takes a cleaver right there and chops off his finger, leaving him with the troupe.

Although he is hesitant at first, he finds his way and path along the troop. Dieyi is increasingly given dan, or female roles, to learn, and Xiaolou, then known as Shitou, is given the jing, or male, roles. When running through the lines of one of the big Chinese operas, Dieyi keeps messing up a line and saying he is a boy instead of a girl, which puts him in a bad position with the opera head.

With another student one day, Laizi, Dieyi tries to escape. Laizi gets his candied sweets, and the two end up coming back home. As Dieyi is physically punished, Laizi hangs himself.

More time passes. An agent is brought onto the grounds to see who would be able to bring in money, and Dieyi screws up his line in front of the agent, yet again saying he is a boy, not a girl.

The agent is disgusted by the fact he can’t say such a simple line in the opera and starts to walk away, but Xiaolou gets angry and rips out some of Dieyi’s teeth, which sparks him, with a bloodied mouth, to get it right in front of the agent.

Somehow, this works. They get the agent. The group performs for a well-known eunuch, who, after the performance, sexually assaults Dieyi. Only Xiaolou has an idea of what happened.

But from here on out, the movie becomes a wild ride. Dieyi and Xiaolou become famous for their performances in the opera Farewell My Concubine, but a well-known opera love, Yuan Shiqing, starts to notice Dieyi in the process.

He gives Dieyi a sword that once beloved to the eunuch from before, but Dieyi is now in love with Xiaolou, but this will be a one-sided love.

Xiaolou saves a prostitute, Juxian, from a group of men and they decide to get married. This angers Dieyi greatly, and this is the beginning of the end of their relationship. When Xiaolou is arrested for going against the Japanese, as World War II is beginning, Dieyi does a private performance for the Japanese, damning himself later on when the Chinese Revolution happens.

He does this out of love, and because Juxian promises to leave forever. However, she doesn’t really keep her word, especially as Xiaolou is pissed at Dieyi for performing for the Japanese.

Their former troupe leader, as abusive as he was, finally dies, and Dieyi takes in one of the boys: Xiao Si. Years ago, he saved Xiao Si from being left out in the cold, and he remembers that. Even more time passes, and the Chinese Civil War begins.

Xiao Si becomes a devout Communist, and Dieyi is descending even further into an opium addiction. As more people begin to denounce the old ways, and Dieyi continues to say that traditional cultural opera is superior, it breeds even more resentment in Xiao Si, who eventually takes away Dieyi’s role in the troupe.

Upset, Dieyi stops speaking to Xiaolou. The Cultural Revolution begins, and the entire troupe is condemned for a public humiliation. Yuan is sentenced to die, and Xiaolou and Juxian watch in horror as he’s led off to his death.

Earlier in the movie, Yuan cut ties with Dieyi after Dieyi refused to deny what he did for Xiaolou with the Japanese, which had branded him as a traitor.

But now, when Xiaolou gives up Dieyi to save himself, this convinces Dieyi to give up Juxian for being a prostitute. Xiaolou makes a confession on the spot that he didn’t love her and will never see her again, which leads Juxian to return the sword to Dieyi before killing herself.

Xiao Si is arrested after getting caught with all of Dieyi’s gems and hairpieces for Chinese opera. More time passes, and Dieyi and Xiaolou meet for that scene in the beginning of the film.

But this time, we see what happens. Dieyi, like the concubine in the drama, takes the sword from Xiaolou—which is the one they once envied at Eunuch Zhang’s home before Dieyi was sexually assaulted—and slits his own throat.

His final line is “I am not a girl,” showing how his love will never be fulfilled and how his identity was blurred, filled with trauma.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a loaded movie, and the levels of symbolism are deep. Back in college I wrote an entire paper about how Dieyi’s blurring of reality and drama, how he’s made fun of for being opera obsessed, is a trauma response because of how terrible his life was.

It was full of abuse and moments that were ridden with loss and despair, and I don’t know how I would’ve done it if I were ever in his shoes.

But the more obvious forms of symbolism are the sword, and how Juxian sacrifices her own life for Xiaolou only to get betrayed. There’s something so human about these kinds of movies and how they depict betrayal, and it’s horrifying to see what everyone went through during this time.

I could write thousands of words about this movie, I swear.

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