Farewell My Concubine

Tomorrow, 7 November, is Lidong, the Start of Winter. A classical Chinese almanac defines the term as the point when 'all things are gathered in and stored away' — the moment in the year when whatever must be kept is brought indoors. Today pairs two films that each fold an entire era into a single work. Farewell My Concubine (1993) gathers half a century of Chinese history into one Peking opera; The Color of Pomegranates (1969) spreads the life of an eighteenth-century Armenian poet across a sequence of near-still images. In one, a person is swallowed by a role; in the other, a person is laid out as a picture. Made 24 years apart at opposite ends of Eurasia, both ask the same question: as the world outside keeps being rewritten, can anyone still gather themselves back in?

1924 年的北平，一个孩子被母亲送进戏班学戏。他与同门师兄一起挨打、一起长大，多年后两人成了台上一对名角，专演〈霸王别姬〉：一个饰虞姬，一个饰项羽。戏里是固定的生离死别，戏外是几十年不断改写的世道。影片真正盯住看的，是那身行头穿久之后，人还分不分得清哪一句是台词、哪一句是自己。

It won the Palme d'Or at the 46th Cannes Film Festival in 1993, jointly with Jane Campion's The Piano, and became the first Chinese-language film to take the prize. The same year brought a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language, plus two nominations at the 66th Academy Awards, for Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Language Film. Its importance lies less in the trophies than in its method: Chen Kaige uses the Peking opera Farewell My Concubine as a measuring device, keeping the play fixed while the country outside it is rewritten from the early Republic into the decades that follow. The film's themes are usually named as identity confusion and the blurred line between real life and the stage. Cheng Dieyi is trained as a dan, a female role; an opening in which he repeatedly misrecites a line about his own sex and is beaten for it announces the whole design — once a person has been trained into someone else, how does he call himself back? It is one of the landmark films of the Fifth Generation, the movement that brought Chinese directors to world attention, and Time magazine placed it among its 100 best films in global history in 2005. A few weeks after its Chinese release, changes were demanded; the version approved for re-release in September 1993 had 14 minutes removed. The 171-minute original is the one now generally circulated.