Wow

I saw "Farewell My Concubine" for the first time today (Ba Wang Bie Ji in Mandarin) and man... it really floored me. Other than "American History X", I don't think there's ever been another movie that makes me feel so uncomfortable yet touched after watching it.

It was one of our assignments this week in my ASIAN362 course - Writer and Society in Modern China. Throughout last semester and this year many of my courses touched upon China's history and development throughout the 20th century, but seeing the words from a textbook or a novel brought to life is just different. I had seen "To Live" in high school, but frankly I had forgotten a lot of it, and given that it was 3:00 AM by the time I finished it... suffice to say, the emotional impact wasn't there.

We read about the Republican Revolution and the campaigns of the Communist Party many times, but when you see the words, "struggle" you don't really think anything of it. Sure, in some documentary clips they showed the son of a landlord describing what a "struggle session" was like, and how he was telling them that he was sorry his father was a landlord and that the villagers could take anything they wanted, if they let him live... but still, that was coming from an old man in financial and existential security, facing a camera decades later.

"Farewell my Concubine" covers a significant span of time, starting before the Republican Revolution, later on depicting the second Sino-Japanese War, later the Communist Revolution, then the Cultural Revolution launched by the CCP. By simply following the lives of two Beijing Opera actors, the tumultuous history of the time was completely understandable, and it was impossible not to feel sympathetic to them. The film does not shy away from anything - it does whatever it must to tell its story, whether it's through the grueling training that the actors had to go through as kids (and the lead character having his extra finger from a birth defect cut off by his mother to convince the owners of the opera to accept him) to Japanese troops marching into their city, to KMT soldiers disrupting their play and destroying the stage and their props, to a surreal "struggle session" conducted by Communist zealots, we are taken along Modern Chinese history, and it is indeed a ride for the ages.

I've noted before that I really love manga for the possibilities it gives the writer/artist in storytelling, and to a certain extent movies have a similar power as well. Obviously there are some limits that feature length movies have to abide by such as time - the Harry Potter series suffers noticeably from this - or details that can be overlooked by a viewer who didn't pay close enough attention... but there are other things that the medium just does so well. Sound is something that is too often overlooked; yet it is absolutely crucial to creating the mood of a setting and environment, and in particular for off-screen sound effects (such as for beatings) it can be used to let the audience's imagination run wild, to go beyond the screen.

Ultimately, that's what great writers do - they compel you to go beyond the world that they have described through their words - to imagine all the possibilities that would take decades to complete if all transcribed onto paper. It's even better if they can convince you that it's all real.

And in this case where it's a very plausible story taken from a historical era, it increases the emotional impact tenfold, because you know that actual people quite possibly went through the heart-wrenching experience that you just saw on the screen.

Movies are awesome.