(Lebewohl meine Konkubine [de])
China 1993
d: Chen Kaige
Tomson Films (Region 2 fr)
sc: Lilian Lee, Lei Bik-Wa, Lu Wei (from the novel by Lilian Lee)
c: Changwei Gu (Color)
e: Pei Xiaonan
pd: Yuhe Yang, Zhanjia Yang
m: Zhao Jiping
p: Hsu Feng (Beijing Film Studio / China Film Co-Production / Maverick Picture Company / Tomson Films)
w: Leslie Cheung, Fengyi Zhang, Li Gong, Qi Lu, Da Ying, You Ge, Chun Li, Han Lei, Di Tong, Mingwei Ma, Yang Fei, Zhi Yin, Hailong Zhao, Dan Li, Wenli Jiang
pr: 16 Sep 1993
aw: Academy Awards 1994 Nominated Oscar Best Cinematography; Best Foreign Language Film • BAFTA Awards 1994 Best Film not in the English Language • Boston Society of Film Critics Awards 1993 Best Foreign Language Film • Camerimage 1993 Won Silver Frog; Nominated Golden Frog • Cannes Film Festival 1993 FIPRESCI Prize; Golden Palm, tied with "The Piano" • Golden Globes 1994 Best Foreign Language Film • London Critics Circle Film Awards 1995 Foreign Language Film of the Year • Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards 1993 Best Foreign Film • Mainichi Film Concours 1995 Best Foreign Language Film • National Board of Review, USA 1993 Best Foreign Language Film • New York Film Critics Circle Awards 1993 Best Foreign Language Film; Best Supporting Actress Li Gong • Political Film Society, USA 1994 Special Award
rt: 164:14 (+4%PAL= 171) min
dvd-rl: 24 Mär 2005
ar: 1.78:1 (16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen)
sd: Mandarin Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround • French Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
st: French (fixed)
supp: • Documentary "Making Of" (22:36 min)
Hitherto, Chen Kaige's films have specialised in poetic, allusive allegory: in "King of the Children" and "Life on a String", especially, socio-political content was conveyed by elliptical narratives and vivid but often enigmatic images. Here, however, Chen adopts a direct and less personal approach to his country's troubled history as he charts the similarly troubled relationship, from 1925 to 1977, of two Peking Opera actors. Their boyhood friendship arises in protective reaction to the disciplines of the Academy; but by the time they've become stars, Dieyi (Cheung) has fallen for his friend Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi), mirroring the on-stage devotion of the concubine he plays for Xiaolou's King of Chu. Inevitably, he is distraught when Xiaolou marries a prostitute, Juxian (Gong Li), who is more than a match for Dieyi's jealous hysteria; but the trio are also caught up in bigger events so that over the decades their mutual suspicion, deceits, divided loyalties, betrayals and acts of desperate support for one another chime with the mood of China itself. Appropriately operatic, Chen's visually spectacular epic is sumptuous in every respect. Intelligent, enthralling, rhapsodic.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Like "Gone With the Wind", Chen Kaige's 1993 blockbuster—half a century of contemporary Chinese history (1925-'77) seen through the lives of two Peking Opera actors and a former prostitute—is worth seeing largely for its pizzazz: riveting performances, epic sweep and storytelling, bold and melodramatic use of color, and a capacity to generalize suggestively about large historical events. But this approach has limitations. The rather gingerly treatment of a lead character's homosexuality, while somewhat taboo breaking for a big-budget Chinese production, tends toward inscrutability, and the emphasis on violence in the early opera-training sequences sometimes has the effect of inflated rhetoric. Nevertheless, this is entertaining filmmaking on a grand scale. Despite having protested the Chinese censor's cuts, the distributor Miramax induced the director to cut 14 minutes from the U.S. prints, making this 155-minute version even shorter than the censored one.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
•••••
Chen Kaige's sweeping saga of love, art, and their betrayal in the tumult of Chinese politics of the last half century was a bit of a shock after films of abstract beauty like "Yellow Earth". But in telling of the lifelong relationship of two actors in the Beijing opera-Cheng Dieyi, a dan (impersonator of women) and Duan Xiaolou, a sheng (player of good and righteous males)-Chen creates a many-layered reality in which all the stage is a world. Male and female, art and life, loyalty and betrayal are all as fluid as the smoke that wafts through Chen's studiedly "Oriental" sets. But opera, in the film's Dickensian first half, and politics, in its second, are supposed to be somehow concrete. The sensitive individual is crushed by the blows of an art that doesn't change, and the whims of history in the making.
— PFA
