Farewell My Concubine

A film that tells a friendship of more than fifty years alongside China's political upheaval across the same span. Two boys are given to a Peking opera school. The training is merciless: beatings, days of holding positions, the voice forced open. Douzi is assigned the female roles and Shitou the male, and that division determines both their lives. Years later they are famous performers, and the work they play on stage gives the film its title. History runs behind them: the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the founding of the People's Republic and the Cultural Revolution. Each period demands something different of opera performers, and in each period one is expected to denounce the other. At the centre is the closing of the distance between Douzi's identity on stage and his own. Leslie Cheung plays Douzi, Zhang Fengyi plays Shitou and Gong Li the woman Shitou marries. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993, sharing it with The Piano, and was the first Chinese film to take the prize. Its release in China was first halted, then permitted with cuts. One of the significant films of the last thirty years for anyone who likes drama on an epic scale and historical narrative. It is long and moves slowly; the film runs close to three hours.