By now Douzi and Shitou have changed their names to Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) and are known throughout the provinces.

He makes it to the top and, even better, so does his best friend, Shitou, who was the only one to stand up for Douzi when he arrived. He longs to be like them, and for the sake of this dream he endures the beatings and other sadistic punishments that are dished out every day.Īnd Douzi's dream comes true. When Douzi watches them perform, the stage transformed and radiant with light and magic, his eyes double in size. And to prove themselves worthy of the opera's past, they train, like soldiers in boot camp, stretching and contorting and disciplining their bodies, to learn the precise and demanding techniques of makeup and song.Įven though the peasants are nearly penniless, the opera is more popular than ever, its glamorous stars worshiped like deities. Essentially they are sold into slavery to the theater.

Nearly all of these boys - the Peking Opera is an all-male cult - are like Douzi, unwanted, abandoned or left at the front steps of the opera's living quarters by parents too poor to raise them. And the early scenes, in which this shy, stubborn lad is introduced to the torturous discipline and physical training that all students of the opera must endure, have the bustle and textured squalor of the orphanage scenes in Dickens.

The main focus of this sweeping epic is Douzi, a delicate young boy who is dropped by his mother, a prostitute, into the hands of Master Guan (Lu Qi), the head of the Peking Opera in 1925. The most compelling aspect of 'Farewell My Concubine,' the sumptuous, controversial new film from Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige, is its swooning infatuation with the theater - with its colors, its vitality and even its cruel rigors.

Chinese opera movie