Farewell My Concubine (film) - Wikipedia. Farewell My Concubine is a 1. Chinese drama film directed by Chen Kaige. It is one of the central works of the Fifth Generation movement that brought Chinese film directors to world attention. Similar to other Fifth Generation films like To Live and The Blue Kite, Farewell My Concubine explores the effect of China's political turmoil during the mid- 2. In this case, the affected are two male stars in a Peking opera troupe and the woman who come between them.

The film is an adaptation of the novel by Lilian Lee, who is also one of the film's screenplay writers. Farewell My Concubine stars Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi and Gong Li. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1. Cannes Film Festival and went on to win other honours.

As the film opens, a street crowd watches a troupe of boys perform Peking opera, supervised by their aging director, Master Guan. When Laizi attempts to run away, Shitou placates the crowd by breaking a brick on his head; the crowd cheers, but Shitou is later punished for the stunt. An onlooking mother brings her son to the troupe to be trained, using a cleaver to amputate her child's objectionable superfluous finger, and marking the contract with her thumb print in the blood. Shitou welcomes the newcomer as . Laizi and Douzi run away, but witness a performance by an opera master that inspires them to return to the troupe. They find Shitou being beaten for allowing their escape, and Douzi accepts his punishment as Master Guan beats him mercilessly. Shitou tries to intervene, when an assistant informs them that Laizi has hanged himself.

Douzi attaches himself to Shitou and is trained to play dan (female) roles. Shitou learns the jing, a painted- face male lead. Douzi practises the monologue . He repeats this mistake, doing so in front of an agent who might fund the troupe. Shitou viciously jams Master Guan's brass tobacco pipe in Douzi's mouth as punishment.

Douzi looks dazed, but whispers, . Shitou admires a beautiful sword in Zhang's collection, stating that if he were emperor, Douzi would be his queen. Douzi responds that one day he hopes to give Shitou a sword like that. Douzi is to meet Zhang alone, and catches him in a lascivious embrace with a young girl.

Douzi is afraid as the man eyes him up and down, and seeks to be with Shitou, but Zhang catches him and pushes him to the ground. Hours later he emerges, and Shitou cannot get him to say a word.

Directed by Bille August. With Pelle Hvenegaard, Max von Sydow, Erik Paaske, Björn Granath. The end of the 19th century. A boat filled with Swedish emigrants comes. Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /srv/users/serverpilot/apps/jujaitaly/public/index.php on line 447. Graphic comparisons of releases, upcoming cover images, release calendar, and reviews. You have not yet voted on this site! If you have already visited the site, please help us classify the good from the bad by voting on this site.

It is clear that Douzi has been sexually assaulted. On their way home, Douzi spies an abandoned baby, and despite Master Guan's urging that . The adult Dieyi is in love with Xiaolou, but the sexual aspects of his affection are not returned. When they become a hit in Beijing, a patron, Yuan Shiqing, slowly courts Dieyi. Xiaolou takes a liking to Juxian, a headstrong courtesan at the upscale House of Blossoms. Xiaolou intervenes when a mob of drunk men harass Juxian and says that they are announcing their engagement.

Juxian later buys her freedom and, deceiving him into thinking she was thrown out, pressures Xiaolou to keep his word. When Xiaolou announces their engagement, Dieyi and Xiaolou have a falling out. Dieyi calls her . Dieyi takes up with Master Yuan, who gives him Zhang's sword. An aged Master Guan shames them into re- forming the troupe. The complex relationship between these three characters is then tested in the succession of political upheavals that encompass China from the onset of the Second Sino- Japanese War.

The film also follows the fates of Na Kun, who turns his theater troupe over to the new government after 1. Xiao Si and Douzi have an argument about training and punishment at the end of which Xiao Si threatens revenge.

The role of the Concubine is usurped by Xiao Si with Xiaolou's complicity. Betrayed, Dieyi leaves and becomes addicted to opium. Later, Xiaolou and Juxian help him to recover and the troupe surrounds him to congratulate his return to health.

On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Shitou and Juxian are seen burning now- contraband literature and clothing. After a few drinks, they rekindle their relationship. The scene shifts to Shitou being questioned by the Red Guards on a few unpatriotic words he said years ago and overheard by their manager.

Xiao Si is seen in the background, seemingly in a position of power. The entire opera troupe is taken out in public for a humiliating struggle session by the Red Guards. Under duress, Shitou confesses that Douzi performed for the occupying Japanese and may have had a relationship with Yuan Shiqing. Enraged, Douzi tells the mob that Juxian was a prostitute.

Shitou is forced to admit that he married a prostitute but swears that he doesn't love her and will never see her again. Juxian is crushed to hear his words and commits suicide. Xiao Si is seen in a gym practising Concubine Yu's role, happy over having usurped Douzi's position, but the group of Red Guards catch him in the act and his fate is unclear. The film then jumps to Douzi and Shitou's reunion in 1. They are practising Farewell My Concubine, and their relationship seems to have mended since the tribunal and suicide of Shitou's wife.

They exchange a smile and Shitou begins with the line that gave Douzi trouble forty years ago. Douzi makes the same error of finishing the line with .

Shitou corrects him and they continue practising. Douzi then commits suicide by sword. Leslie Cheung as Cheng Dieyi (. After meeting with Lee, they recruited Chinese writer Lu Wei for the screenplay, and in 1. The film was objected to for its portrayal of homosexuality, suicide, and violence perpetrated under Mao Zedong's Communist government during the Cultural Revolution.

Because the film won the Palme d'Or at the 1. Cannes Film Festival, the ban was met with international outcry.

This release featured a censored version; scenes dealing with the Cultural Revolution and homosexuality were cut, and the final scene was revised to . Its final grossing in the US market is $5,2. This is the version seen in U. S. According to Peter Biskind's book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, Louis Malle, who was president of the Cannes jury that year, said: . It was better before those guys made cuts. Empire magazine's . Time Out's . Box Office Mojo.

Retrieved 2. 01. 6- 0. The New York Times. 2010 Blockbuster Movies Bedeviled (2017) on this page. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2.

The Illuminated Lantern. Retrieved 2. 01. 6- 0. University of California Press. JSTOR 1. 21. 34. 89. The New York Times. ISSN 0. 36. 2- 4.

Retrieved June 1. The New York Times. ISSN 0. 36. 2- 4. Retrieved June 1. Retrieved 2. 01. 6- 0.

The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2 April 2. Rogerebert. com. Retrieved 2. June 2. 01. 7. The Washington Post. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. The Washington Post. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2.

The New York Times. Retrieved 1. 4 March 2.

February 2. 00. 5. Retrieved 1. 4 March 2. Farewell My Concubine. Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2. June 2. 01. 7. The Hollywood Reporter. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. Boston Society of Film Critics. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2.

British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2.

Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. Mainichi Film Awards. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2.

National Board of Review. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2. Writers Pick 'List' but Bypass Spielberg : Movies: Film Critics Circle echoes its L. A. The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2. 6 June 2.

Further reading. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi. ISBN 9. 78. 08. 22. Retrieved 3 February 2. Google Books. Clark, Paul (2. Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films.

Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Braester, Yomi. Farewell My Concubine: National Myth and City Memories.

In Chinese Films in Focus: 2. New Takes, edited by Chris Berry, 8. London: British Film Institute, 2. Leung, Helen Hok- Sze (2. Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (Large Print 1.

Pelle the Conqueror Movie Review (1. There were immigrants to America who thought the streets would be paved with gold. Lasse Karlsson, a middle- aged farmhand from Sweden, has more modest hopes as he sails with his young son to Denmark in the early years of this century. In Denmark, he says, they will drink coffee in bed on Sunday mornings, and eat roast pork with raisins for Sunday dinner. He cradles his son, Pelle, in his arms as their little passenger vessel noses into a small harbor, where disappointment sets in almost at once. Advertisement. Almost everyone on the boat is a Swedish laborer, looking for work. Farmers have turned out to inspect them as if they were cattle.

One by one, the men are hired, until finally only Lasse and Pelle are left. Nobody wants to hire Lasse (Max von Sydow). He is too old. He has a son.

Half- drunk and defiant, he all but forces himself on the last of the farmers, a man named Kongstrup who has a shifty look about him. Lasse and Pelle sit in the farmer’s cart as it passes through fields on its way to their futures.“Pelle the Conqueror” uses this beginning, full of hope and dreams, in an interesting way. Through the seasons that follow during a long year on the Kongstrup farm, the vision somehow stays alive inside Pelle, even though life seems organized to disappoint him.

The film begins with one hopeful immigration - Sweden to Denmark - and ends with another, Pelle’s decision to take his chances in the larger world. Life on the Kongstrup farm is defined by the land, the seasons, and the personalities of the people who live there. The Kongstrups themselves hardly appear for long stretches of time; they live in a big house set aside from the farm buildings, and Mrs.

Kongstrup spends her days drinking brandy while her husband chases wenches. He has no shame, not even about the one unfortunate woman who appears at his front door from time to time, their child in her arms. In the quarters where the laborers live, life is defined by the sadism of the “Manager” (Erik Paaske), a bully who spots weaknesses in his men and exploits them. He is assisted in his cruelty by the “Trainee,” a youth who takes particular pleasure in tormenting Pelle. The boy turns to his father for protection, but Lasse is too old and too weary to help. Eventually Pelle makes his own alliances for friendship and protection.“Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the Grand Prix at the 1.

Cannes Film Festival, was adapted by Bille August, whose previous film, “Twist and Shout,” was about teenagers coming of age in the 1. In tone and sometimes in visuals, the movie resembles “The Emigrants” and “The New Land” (1.

Jan Troell’s two- part epic about Scandinavians who settled in Minnesota. Both films star Max von Sydow, that mighty oak of Swedish cinema, who is unsurpassed at the difficult challenge of appearing not to act, of appearing to be simple and true even in scenes of great complexity. Advertisement. The film is a richness of events. There are scenes of punishingly hard work in the fields, under the eye of the Manager.

A challenge between the Manager and an independent- minded worker, with tragic results. The intrigue in the big house, where Mrs.

Kongstrup exacts a particularly ironic revenge for her husband’s philandering. The heartbreak of a beautiful local girl, who has fallen in love above her station. The most touching sequence in the film involves a winter’s romance between Lasse and a sailor’s wife who lives in a cottage near the sea. Pelle is the first to meet the woman, whose husband has been missing for years and is presumed dead. He introduces his father to her, and the two people take a liking to one another that is practical as well as sentimental.

There is a scene of great delicacy and sensible realism, in which they evaluate their resources and decide they should live together, and afterwards Lasse is able to suggest with a smile to his son that they might soon be having coffee in bed on Sundays after all. Von Sydow’s work in the film has been honored with an Academy Award nomination for best actor, well deserved, particularly after a distinguished career in which he stood at the center of many of Ingmar Bergman’s greatest films (“The Virgin Spring,” “The Seventh Seal”). But there is not a bad performance in the movie, and the newcomer, Pelle Hvenegaard, never steps wrong in the title role (there is poetic justice in the fact that he actually was named after the novel that inspired this movie). It is Pelle, not Lasse, who is really at the center of the movie, which begins when he follows his father’s dream, and ends as he realizes he must follow his own.