Farewell My Concubine · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy's face being painted. The white ground goes on first, then the red, and the hands doing it are not his own. Chen Kaige returns to this operation again and again — the paint, the layered costume, the mirror, the labor — and he shoots it with the same reverence he gives the finished performance. Hold onto that face. Fifty years of Chinese history are about to run over the man it belongs to, and the film's hardest idea is that the face is the part that survives.

Farewell My Concubine covers the warlord 1920s, the Japanese occupation, the Nationalist and Communist transitions, and the Cultural Revolution, and it never once stops to explain any of them. It measures them. Chen's real invention is a clock. He takes one unchanging artwork — the old opera about Xiang Yu, the defeated Chu hegemon, and Yu Ji, the concubine who stays — and stages it again and again across the decades. The opera doesn't change. Everything around it does. Each return tells you what year it is by telling you what the performance now costs.

Deleuze finished his cinema books eight years before this film existed, so none of this is his verdict on it. But he gives you a word for that painted face, and the word is gest. He takes it from Brecht and means something narrower than "gesture": a posture or attitude that, held long enough, exposes the whole social relation that produced it. Deleuze was drawn to films that stopped telling you about a world and instead showed bodies carrying the shape that world had pressed into them. Concubine makes the argument the hard way: it shows the manufacture. The training compound is the film's foundation — boys drilled, struck, made to hold a position until the position holds them. What Cheng Dieyi ends up with is not a skill he can put down at the end of the night. It is a body with a shape. Leslie Cheung plays a lifetime of that shape. The delicacy is technique, and the technique is a wound.

You can watch this film as a love triangle with a history lesson attached: Dieyi loves Duan Xiaolou, Juxian marries him, the regimes keep changing in the background. That reading works, and it is largely how the film was sold abroad. The gest gives you something better. It explains why the backstage scenes and the political scenes are the same scene. When the Cultural Revolution drags the two men in front of a mob and makes them denounce each other, the film has not switched from theater to reality. It has staged a second theater, with worse costumes and no exit.

Deleuze has a term for that crowd too. The dividual: a mass rendered as a single affective unit, one face assembled out of many faces. The struggle session is a dividual manufactured by a state, and the performers are required to perform to it. Chen inherits the whole set piece from Hibiscus Town (1986), which perfected the melodramatic accounting of Maoist coercion forcing intimates to denounce one another. His addition is to put professional actors at the center of it, so that denunciation becomes legible as a genre of acting — the one genre the era would still pay for.

The opera itself functions as what Deleuze calls a crystal seed. A crystal-image is one where a thing and its double can no longer be separated: present and reflection swap places, and the exchange never resolves. Deleuze noticed these crystals forming around stages; theater inside a film seeds them. Here the seed is Yu Ji's fidelity. Dieyi does not so much play the concubine as get played by her, and the loyalty the role demands is exactly the loyalty his life ruins itself supplying. Which one is the real man? By the middle of the film you cannot answer, and that is not muddle. It is the engine.

Around that seed runs a second crystalline process: decomposition, Deleuze's name (he was thinking of Visconti) for an ordered, aristocratic world visibly rotting from the inside while it keeps its manners. Peking opera in this film is that world — a feudal art with its masters, its rituals, its hierarchy of drilled children — and each arriving regime eats a little more of it while the shows go on. Gu Changwei makes the rot chromatic. The stage reds and golds and the warm interiors of the Republican years cool steadily toward grey as the film reaches the People's Republic. That is a colour-image in the strict sense, a colour that absorbs a scene and its feeling rather than decorating it, and Gu had been building the technique for a decade: the single drenching primary of Red Sorghum (1987), the dye-vats of Ju Dou (1990), where saturated fabric works as a pressure gauge. In Concubine the gauge reads loss of saturation as loss of a world.

The editing follows the same logic. Pei Xiaonan cuts for performance-length duration rather than montage, which is why the film feels conducted rather than assembled. Bazin argued for the long take because an uninterrupted event keeps its ambiguity and hands responsibility to the viewer. Chen has a different reason. An aria has a length, a drilled routine has a length, a public humiliation has a length, and cutting any of them down to its meaning would falsify the labor that produced it. The structure is closer to music than to plot: a refrain returns, the world around it has moved, and the difference between the two is the drama.

The framing reunion in the late 1970s turns the whole chronicle into a recollection-image, Deleuze's mildest time concept, the dated flashback of a former present. It is honestly the least interesting thing the film does with time. The serious work is in the bodies, which carry the decades without needing a dissolve to announce it.

Then the politics, which Deleuze would insist are not a layer underneath. In modern political cinema, he argued, there is no private business that is not immediately political; the two levels people keep trying to separate were never separate. That is the answer to the temptation to read Concubine as national allegory, with private passion standing in for the fate of China. Nothing stands in for anything. The regimes arrive inside the marriage, inside the troupe, inside the makeup. Deleuze borrowed a phrase from Klee for this cinema: the people are missing. A political filmmaker cannot presuppose a unified people and speak on its behalf; a people has to be invented, and the state's counterfeit is always on offer. The struggle-session mob is that counterfeit, a people assembled by being made to shout in unison. The film's own paperwork says the same thing in a drier register — mainland director, Hong Kong novel, Hong Kong star, Taiwan money, Palme d'Or, ban at home, a cut version for domestic release, an Oscar submission filed as Hong Kong. A film about one Chinese century had to be built out of three Chinas, and was trimmed before that century could watch it.

Its debts are specific. Two Stage Sisters (1964) is the template outright: two stage performers, a bond and its rupture, decades of political upheaval. Chen inherits that architecture and darkens it. His own Yellow Earth (1984) established the grammar — monumental static composition and diegetic folk performance used to interrogate Chinese history rather than illustrate it. Raise the Red Lantern (1991) supplied Zhao Jiping's percussive, opera-inflected scoring and the symmetrical enclosure of a period compound, where ritual space does the trapping. What Concubine sent forward is formal and infrastructural at once: it proved a mainland art film could be a world prestige object, and it made the tri-territorial co-production — Hong Kong and Taiwan capital behind mainland ambition, festival first, Miramax after — the working model for the Chinese-language cinema that came next.

Watch it once for the story. Then watch the makeup: who applies it, at what age, and what has to be broken first. Watch the colour go out of the rooms. Somewhere in there is the question the film refuses to close — whether history destroys Cheng Dieyi, or whether he was finished the day the paint went on and the boy underneath agreed to disappear.