Farewell My Concubine

An unhurried journey on the great tide of modern Chinese history, this gorgeous, intoxicating epic is confident enough of its visual and narrative power not to rush the telling.

It is [Chen's] controlled, poetic, even visionary use of his medium that gives the film power and meaning.

With stunning set pieces and the dramatic backdrop of the revolution, Kaige captures perfectly the relationship between the two boys.

The scenes in the Peking Opera School, where boys are caned for doing wrong or right, are no less horrifying than the later tableaus of public humiliation at the hands of the Maoists.

This is entertaining filmmaking on a grand scale.

Seductively lensed but emotionally uninvolving.

It is the colors, the life contained in those vivid those tableux, the theaters, street scenes of this or that army marching by, the shadows and fog of “reality” intruding on the rigidly constrained theatrical performances that stick in the memory

A complex examination of both China's political history and sexual identity. It's also about art.

Thoughtfully considered and gorgeously rendered in a production worthy of Lean, Chen's film marks the intersection between life and art, politics and performance, the intimate and the epic.

The aspirations of art pitted against the never-ending flux of politics. That is the underlying conflict driving Farewell My Concubine.