FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE (Directed by Chen Kaige. Starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fangyi, Gong Li)

THE WINNER of the Palm D’Or at Cannes last year, and banned in its native China, Farewell My Concubine is a long, visually ravishing, long, emotionally intense, long, politically complex, long, dizzyingly ambitious and (even shorn of 15 minutes for an international audience) extremely long movie. It spans five decades of modern Chinese history, from 1925 to 1977, reflecting war, the Japanese occupation and the Cultural Revolution in the turbulent lives and relationships of its protagonists, two famous performers in the Peking Opera.

Ritualised and spectacular, the opera provides two archetypes who represent the tensions between male and female: a king and his concubine. The actors who play them are both male, although Cheng (Leslie Cheung) is forced by fiercely authoritarian tutors to take the female role, one that the circumstances of his life will ultimately imprint upon his consciousness, casting him as a homosexual in (unrequited) love with his fellow star Duane (Zhang Fengyi). As heaving, violent historical changes occur, the two friends relationship fluctuates, as they alternately help, abuse, betray and support one another.

As a gender study, it is over complex and politically reactionary, rendered even more confusing by Duane’s marriage to a brassy prostitute (played by Gong Li, star of Raise The Red Lantern and The Story Of Qui Ju) whose genuine femininity cast Cheng’s impersonation of a woman into an even greyer area. And as an essay in Chinese politics it is just as bewildering, with every major personal crisis being paralleled with a cataclysmic turn in history. There are so many socio-political problems it is a wonder the characters have any time to worry about little things like personal relationships.

But as a melodrama, Farewell My Concubine is wild and compelling, and as an epic it takes the same period as Bertolucci’s anodyne The Last Emperor and gives it back its suffering. You don’t have to read subtitles or be a Chinese scholar to get the message: life is shit, and then you die. But at least these complex characters get to suffer in fabulously opulent circumstances.