Home Video Hovel: Farewell My Concubine, by Scott Nye

When one considers – as we have in past episodes – whether cinema’s cultural impact has diminished, consider Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine. It was the first film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (albeit sharing the prize with The Piano), but the Chinese government would not let it remain in domestic theaters, pulling it after two weeks to be reviewed by censors, and then banning it outright. International outcry over the ban was so severe that China feared it would impact their bid to host the Summer Olympics, and allowed the film to be released with some material removed.

Lost in a lot of the “used to be a society” posting that goes on regarding 90s cinema – referring to a notion that films used to be better-produced, better-attended, better-gauged in the cultural register – is that the decade was both the peak of the prior century’s endless pursuit for wider regard and the birth of contemporary attitudes towards preservation. As with so many foreign language films of the era, Farewell My Concubine was sort of caught in the middle. It was so highly regarded that it affected the perception of its home country, yet its censorship was not limited to it.

In another commonality with its foreign-language brethren, the film was distributed in the U.S. by Miramax, and before Harvey Weinstein was known for more heinous crimes, he was known as Harvey Scissorhands. The scorn of American cinephiles, he re-edited many very famous films (including The Double Life of Veronique, Heavenly Creatures, Like Water for Chocolate, Cinema Paradiso, and The Grandmaster) to make them shorter and more “digestible” for American audiences. That’s not even getting into the films Miramax bought the rights for and either didn’t release or barely released, which is a whole other subject.

Such cases are rarer and rarer these days; there are fewer people seeing such films, and they all care about the integrity of them. There is simply no longer a “general” audience to cater to. So are we richer for having greater access to more films in their fuller form? Or are we poorer for having lost the engagement with them?

It’s not at all ironic that Farewell My Concubine also explores the changing demands of art that stems from societal investment. These are simply cyclical themes in every culture, throughout time. The film covers a fifty-year span that was culturally tumultuous in China, as the Republic of China had recently overthrown the Qing dynasty, but was not long to last, as a long civil war thrust the Republic to Taiwan and established the Communist party as the heads of state for the mainland. The Cultural Revolution that began in 1966 further entrenched their foothold, and they have remained in control ever since.

Farewell My Concubine doesn’t exactly suggest that any of these eras were more or less artist-friendly. The first third or so – when Douzi is forced into a Peking opera troupe as his mother, a sex worker, can no longer care for him – shows he and the other children brutally abused, beaten near death at times, to try to train them for theatrical performance. The troupe’s own success is predicated on landing the support of wealthy sponsors willing to back their performances, and their repertoire is limited to a select few popular plays. Opera’s popularity declines with the rise of communism, but Douzi’s fading artistic success is much more personal, as he has by then become addicted to opium and consumed with jealousy for his lifelong collaborator and friend, Xiaolou; not for Xiaolou’s success (theirs are intertwined by Douzi is easily the more popular), but for Xiaolou’s marriage to Juxian, and the confirmation that the two men could never be together. By the end, they hardly seem to be performing for anyone, acting out the play they’re best known for to an audience of themselves, Douzi trying, eternally, to draw the romantic narrative they depict closer to his own life. The art they trafficked in has been replaced with drama that glorifies the state, spotlights the plight of the worker, but is also more stable and state-supported. Is the art better for being less exploitative and reliant on the whims of the wealthy? Or did we lose something of its beauty along the way?

The film has a tendency to make spectacle of the grotesque, as the child-abuse segments contain, counterintuitively, some of the film’s most complex and captivating images, as Master Guan moves from child to child, some of them suspended on insane devices or striking absurd poses to limber up, rapping them on the knuckles or the bottom with routine contempt. This sets up our viewing expectations to be spectacle-forward, engrossed by the filmmaking that at once involves us in the moment but distances us a bit from the drama.

I don’t often have that issue with cinema – good filmmaking tends to make its own good drama – and I think the roots of the issue run a little deeper with this. By setting the drama against a major arc of Chinese history, the story beats can feel like they’re fitting in a bit too neatly into being a reflection of that history. It’s a common problem with historical epics – lovers separate just as war breaks out, or come together at the precise moment disaster strikes, that sort of thing – and one this can’t quite get out from under. There’s rarely a sense that the characters are anything but puppets of history, which makes them feel less like people with independent urges, desires, and impulses, while at the same time the film is working a little extra to give context that viewers outside of China might be lacking. I’m grateful for that as someone whose knowledge of 20th-century Chinese history only extends as far as The Last Emperor (an illuminating companion film to this), but less so as a filmgoer.

What Farewell My Concubine is, most clearly, immediately, and strikingly, is staggeringly beautiful. Photographed by Gu Changwei, it has in common with many Chinese films of the period a muted but vibrant color scheme, and low-contrast lighting that, rather than mute the light and shadows, seems instead to envelope each frame in them. Each figure, each object seems to emanate from light itself, rather than be illuminated by it.

Criterion’s presentation on their new 4K UHD disc, working from a restoration by Tomson Films in France, is, in essence, perfect. The image is stable but alive, with grain fluctuating convincingly to keep the image in motion, the depth of detail unreal, and damage is extremely minimal. Despite all the smoke, haze, and generally soft quality to the image the filmmakers sought to capture, I didn’t notice any compression artifacts or other issues that arise from bringing such a rich, textured image to home video. It is easily one of the most beautiful transfers I’ve ever seen. There’s no Dolby Vision / HDR pass, but the colors look so spectacular I never gave it a second thought after the initial check. The audio transfer, too, is as clean as you’d hope for a relatively contemporary film, and has a great range to show off in many different environments.

Supplements are fairly limited, though Criterion has, as usual, provided an excellent new piece, a 35-minute interview with producer Janet Yang conducted by film professor Michael Berry. Yang did not produce Farewell My Concubine, but as the president of World Entertainment, she represented the North American distribution aims of, for a time, essentially all Chinese films, which put her in direct contact with Chen. Consequently, she has a lot of stories to share about the cinematic scene in the 1980s and 90s, from which Farewell My Concubine sprung, as well as personal anecdotes about Chen. It becomes a good vessel through which to hash out the difficulties getting this film made and the Chinese government’s reaction to it.

The remaining two supplements are more archival – an 18-minute interview with Chen on The Charlie Rose show in 1993 and a making-of from 2008. The latter is pretty stock stuff, short interviews with the cast with segments of the film cut in, and while the Charlie Rose interview is a little more substantial, you still have to wade through the Charlie Rose of it all. 

It’s all wrapped up with an excellent essay by critic Pauline Chen, available in the leaflet inside the case.

Though Miramax did get the full version of Farewell My Concubine out on DVD, this release represents the first time it’s been available in the States in high-definition, and Criterion’s really done right by it in the presentation, one of the best I’ve seen. Supplements are dense enough to give the needed context for its place in history, and the film itself is substantial enough to chew on.