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Farewell My Concubine

Farewell My Concubine begins very strongly and ends equally powerfully, but has a long, sagging middle, where it, too, turns pretty soapy. The story of two friends, Cheng Dieyi and Duan Xiaolou, apprenticed as boys to the Peking opera, it follows them through their arduous rise to stardom, through their troubled private lives and their downfall under Communist abuse. The tortures inflicted by their teachers on these young boys are related with a chilling objectivity that is not all that far from relish. The atmosphere is midway between that of Oliver Twist and that of Octave Mirbeau's protopornographic classic, Torture Garden.
These sequences explain a lot about why Chinese acrobats are unsurpassable, and why Far Eastern peoples can endure hardship better than most others can. The film, written by Lilian Lee and Lu Wei from the formers novel, is clearly in the popular, subartistic vein, but the impact of the subject matter and Kaige's forceful direction......

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Approximate Word Count: 1184
Approximate Pages: 5 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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