The epitome of the sumptuous films that came out of China and Hong Kong in the early nineties, Farewell My Concubine is one of the richest and most well-made gay films. It's also certainly the most epic, a grand-scale story of personal and national history filmed on location and told with a cast of elaborately costumed thousands. The film now takes on an extra dimension, an eerie and prismic sixth-sense, with the suicide in 2003 of star Leslie Cheung, who in this film played a tormented and suicidal actor who has trouble distinguishing between his realities and his most famous role – the tormented adorer of an indifferent man who takes his own life.

Cheung plays Dieyi, flamboyant star of the Beijing Opera. He and his co-star Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) have been friends since youth, when both endured the rigour of Opera training. Dieyi plays the female role in one of the most popular operas – about a lovestruck concubine waiting for her King to arrive back from war. In this role-within-a-role, Cheung is awesome, clad in bejeweled yellow costumes and moving grandly about the stage, reveling in his fame and his opportunity to act out real-life his unrequited love for his old, straight friend. The superstar pair live like royalty, surrounded with prostitutes, opium and an entourage of hangers-on. Tension arrives with Juxian (Gong Li) a fiery and beautiful prostitute who Xiaolou falls in love with, then marries. As Dieyi manoeuvres around his jealousy of Juxian and develops a serious opium habit, Chinese history starts to suck everything into its powerful gravity, and the Communists take over, sending indulgent lifestyles flying and artists and intellectuals to prison.



Epic films risk coldness, and can drown in their own size (see: The Last Emperor, Gandhi etc) but the grand romance and seething subplots of personal jealousy and unrequited love ground Farewell My Concubine and give it warmth, accessibility and storytelling intelligence. Only nearer the end does the tide of history threaten to swamp the story, with the descent from fiery revolution into drab communist daily life the only unsatisfying and least coherent part of the film. Plot points like Juxian’s pregnancy, or Dieyi’s fall into opium addiction and semi-prostitution, are far more compelling – the historical epic here sits well in the background for the most part. At all times, we’re treated to gorgeous music, detailed sets evoking pre- and post-revolutionary China, and the lusty performances of the three leads.

Cheung is the highlight, though, his deliciously grand Dieyi ignoring anything and everything that doesn’t kow-tow to his starring role.

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