Betrayal in Beijing

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: M. BUTTERFLY

DIRECTOR: DAVID CRONENBERG

WRITER: DAVID HENRY HWANG

TITLE: FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE

DIRECTOR: CHEN KAIGE

WRITERS: LILIAN LEE, LU WEI

THE BOTTOM LINE: Two takes on the androgynous East -- one muddled and myopic, the other acute and majestic.

When East meets West in movies, everything can get blurred: male and female, sex and love, performance and reality. In two new films about China, the gender lines are so tangled that it's hard to tell yin from yang. But it's easy to tell hit from miss. Farewell My Concubine, Chen Kaige's Chinese film that won a top prize at Cannes this year before being briefly suppressed by the Chinese government, is a gorgeous, galvanizing epic with starmaking turns. M. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game.

Hwang's play was based on the incredible-but-true story of a French diplomatic attache in Beijing who conducted a 17-year sexual affair with a Chinese spy posing as an opera singer and never suspected that the lady was a man. (According to Liaison, Joyce Wadler's fascinating new biography of the diplomat, the opera singer was able to fold his genitals inside his body, thus giving the naked illusion of femininity.) From this International Enquirer item, Hwang spun a phantasm of multiple myopia: a man preposterously blinded by love, a European culture blinkered by imperialist prejudice in its view of the mystic East.

On the stage, John Dexter's sumptuously stylized production transformed tabloid headlines into a potent truism: that the heart sees what it sees. Onscreen, the opera singer's gender is never in question; his 5 o'clock shadow gives him away to everyone but the diplomat. Jeremy Irons tries manfully, and John Lone womanfully, to give real life to the characters, but the close-ups defeat them. So do some unlikely plot points: the defendant and his accuser are put alone to undress and wrestle in a police wagon; the diplomat daubs himself as Madama Butterfly before a rapt audience -- of French convicts! Cronenberg is unlikely to find other spectators as gullible as they.

If only Leslie Cheung, the beautifully androgynous star of Farewell My Concubine, had been cast as the singer in M. Butterfly; in his delicacy and passion, he is enough woman for any man to fall for. But then Cheung, a Hong Kong actor living in Vancouver, might not have been available for the role of his career. As Cheng Dieyi, a homosexual star of the Peking Opera who is riven by jealousy when his "stage brother" Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) marries a call girl (Gong Li), Cheung is both steely and vulnerable, with a sexuality that transcends gender -- a Mandarin Michael Jackson.

Three pairs of actors play Cheng and Duan: as children and then teenagers in the Peking Opera School and finally as adults. Imagine that one of those show- biz sagas about performers who can harmonize only on stage -- For the Boys or The Sunshine Boys -- had begun when the main characters really were boys, and continued for 53 years of love, comradeship and betrayal. Concubine (cut by about 15 minutes for U.S. release, but still a rich and savory 2 1/2-hour banquet) hopscotches from the warlord era to the Japanese occupation to the Cultural Revolution and beyond. And under each regime, the artist is a pampered slave: flogged by his teachers, adored by his audience, toyed with by the elite, denounced by Mao's vindictive masses -- and always asked to do that showstopper, the fable about the king and his faithful concubine, just one more time.

Concubine is an Eastern film whose subject, scope and nonstop bustle will be agreeable to Western moviegoers. Anyone can appreciate the splendor of the theatrical pageantry or the dagger eyes of Gong Li, as a dragon lady whose only commandment is survival. The scenes in the Peking Opera School, where boys are caned for doing wrong or right, are no less horrifying than the later tableaus of public humiliation at the hands of the Maoists. But Chen clearly sympathizes with the schoolmasters. From such brutality, he suggests, artists are created. Concubine offers another moral: From the crushing cultural restrictions of the People's Republic, vibrant popular art like this can emerge.