I recently watched Chen Kaige’s classic of Chinese cinema, Farewell My Concubine (1993). My review: It’s got all the stuff that makes movies good! The film tells the story of two orphaned boys who grow up in a Peking opera troupe. Their intense relationship—at times sibling, at times romantic—unfolds against a backdrop of political turmoil. Their fortunes rise and fall through occupations by the Japanese, the KMT, and finally, the Communists.
*Minor spoilers ahead*
The film is dense with references to Chinese history and aesthetics, but I want to delve into one topic relevant to this blog. The first act of the film is striking in its portrayal of opera training. It is grueling and repetitive, and the boys have almost no contact with the outside world. Only after years of daoyin-ing their bodies to perfection do they even begin to learn the poetry. And even then, the beauty of the work, of their bodies, can only be glimpsed in stolen moments, between beatings.
By the time Dieyi and Xiaolou go out into the world, you get the sense that all they have is each other—and the art that has been drilled into their bones.
In Chinese history, actors occupy the lowest caste in a world of brutal poverty and violence. There is nothing romantic about the daoyin these boys practice. It is not a choice. It is not self-expression. It is survival. The grueling repetition associated with Chinese body training is inseparable from the social milieu from which it emerged.
Reflecting on my own social milieu, I was left with many questions:
Is there a place for such single-minded practice in my world?
What is the role of technical mastery, legitimacy, and status in the arts today?
Why train my body into one shape rather than another?
What is lineage?
What are daoyin, gongfu, and taiji outside of their original context?
Our teachers mastered their arts under different pressures than our own—survival, coercion, religious devotion, family obligation. Is that not strange? They offer us beautiful, jagged artifacts, and we must make sense of them. (And perhaps we could, if we weren’t busy doing 10,000 high kicks!) So often, the meanings of the teachings are hidden, fragmented, distorted, or lost.
Half a century after the Cultural Revolution, the questions linger like smoke. The movements of daoyin and taiji are haunted by the ghosts of history. Can we resolve them by learning that history? Can we see the questions floating around our bodies as we practice? Can we open ourselves to change, though we are branded by the past?
Farewell My Concubine is a tragedy in the classic sense: its characters are unable to change with the world. Dieyi and Xiaolou are tragic stars in the sociopolitical opera of 20th-century China. Through the chaos, they carry the embers of a dying art in their bodies, like concubines loyal unto death.
Director Chen Kaige asks the question: how can we see history as anything but tragic? Where does beauty reside if not in the struggle?
Through the tears and senseless brutality, beauty seeps out from every seam of the film. There’s something very Chinese about that. I’m thinking of the classic story in the Zhuangzi about Ding the Butcher, who turns slaughter into a sublime art. It’s kind of funny.
I don’t know much about the original opera, but it seems to portray Consort Yu’s suicide as a celebration of loyalty. That’s kind of funny. The film has its moments of irony and humor. It’s funny that Xiaolou, who plays the King, actually marries a prostitute. The more you delve into Chinese history, the less it fits the tragic mold of the ancient Greeks and their Christian interpreters.
I’ll leave you with the film’s best moment of dark comedy. Out of work, the philandering Xiaolou has started selling crickets for drinking money. The fiery-but-loyal Juxian takes him to task:
Juxian: I can't believe such a grown-up like you is busy playing with bugs
and not working!
Xiaolou: Work? I'm an actor! What else can I do other than acting on stage? Shall I carry coffins?
Loved "Our teachers mastered their arts under different pressures than our own—survival, coercion, religious devotion, family obligation. Is that not strange? They offer us beautiful, jagged artifacts, and we must make sense of them. (And perhaps we could, if we weren’t busy doing 10,000 high kicks!) So often, the meanings of the teachings are hidden, fragmented, distorted, or lost."