In the Flesh: Farewell My Concubine

“We will not waste a single drop of your precious urine,” simpers Eunuch Zhang (Yidi), patron of the arts and former courtier, to the pubescent Cheng Dieyi (Yin Zhi, with Ma Mingwei as his younger self and avant-garde stage and screen legend Leslie Cheung in the main adult role). It is perhaps the single most loathsome thing I’ve seen in film, this wrinkled, broken old man placing a glass teapot on the carpet and leering up at his young guest with a look of greedy anticipation, the crowning indignity of a childhood of beatings, exploitation, and abandonment. Not even the boy’s waste can escape being pawed at by people like Zhang. That Dieyi grows into a pathologically insecure adult can hardly be considered a surprise. The complex relationship between Dieyi and fellow opera performer Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) reflects the needs Dieyi’s upbringing instilled in him: to be kept at arm’s length, to be seen as precious, to be possessed like an object of great beauty.

Director Chen Kaige paints Dieyi and Xiaolou’s world with a masterful combination of both economy and grandeur, capturing the gorgeously lit alleyways and noisy streets of the late Warlord Period one moment and the outrageously ornate and spectacular Peking Opera the next. Where many lesser directors fumble when depicting the stage (think Aronofsky’s flat, lifeless shots of Natalie Portman dancing the titular role in Black Swan)m, Kaige excels. We spin with Dieyi as though connected to his heart by a golden wire. We live in a whirl of stylized costumes and outsized gestures, of painstakingly pitched and modulated vocal control, of bodies bent and deformed to fit the ideals of a tyrannical industry. Kaige captures it all. His camera moves like his characters do, smooth and stately, then all at once in a decisive push. The costuming is a marvel, capturing each era with aplomb, showing us a wider world in the styling of each character.

The film’s gender politics are endlessly complex and engrossing, from Communist Party officials walling off little corners of queer life to claim as their own to the brutalization of children into archaic gender roles. Xiaolou’s reticent, avoidant attachment to Dieyi, his ability to conceal his queer desires behind a facade of conventional manhood, stands in sharp contrast to Dieyi’s visible and obvious faggotry, for lack of a better word. The repeated separations and reunions between the two friend/lover/brothers/co-stars draw this conflict of natures into sharper and sharper relief as they attempt to find an equilibrium their upbringing makes impossible. We watch Dieyi manipulate and emotionally blackmail Xiaolou. We see Xiaolou discard Dieyi, take him for granted, abandon him to the mob. In the end, it is only at the moment of his death that Kaige grants Dieyi the release of privacy. We know what happens. We understand that the decades-old wound inflicted by Eunuch Zhang’s beautiful sword has finally opened up its lips and bled, but we don’t see it. This, if nothing else, is his alone.