Grendel’s Kitchen

Still not enough time to recuperate from Sunday night film “festival.” What was I thinking — that I needed a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory chaser?Cannes Film Festival first prize winner Farewell, My Concubine, directed by Chen Kaige, and based on a novel by Lilian Lee, was alternately banned, shown once, and banned in China. It takes on the monumental task of telling the History of China in the Twentieth Century, from a fascinating periphery: depicting massive geopolitical events from the perspective of two players on the stage, not of the world political scene, but that of the Peking Opera.The story begins in flashback, after a brief glimpse of the characters onstage in 1977, in the 20s, a brutal, violent time of the warlords in which the young boys’ theatrical perfection in the ancient art of Chinese opera is achieved by means of cruel and demanding training/punishment. By the time he reaches adolescence, Douxi (later Dieyi), played by the late Leslie Cheung, is the most exquisite performer in the role of the concubine in the long-played opera “Farewell, My Concubine.” His childhood friend and protector Shitou/Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) plays the role of the King onstage. Alternately, they are the toast of Peking and reviled by Peking as they continue their artistic partnership through the Japanese invasion, the Nationalists, the various Communist regimes and into the Cultural Revolution.The cultural upheaval and complexities of the political scene are matched by the changes they bring to the lives of Dieyi, Xiaolou, and Juxian (a prostitute Xialou marries — to the dismay of Dieyi — played by Gong Li). In a pattern as dramatic as that of the story they embody onstage, love, jealousy, hatred, betrayal, and a dedication to their art move them towards the inevitable fated conclusion. A conclusion which — of all things covered in the film — earned the film its banned state and left me stunned (though not surprised) in a story that makes Madame Butterfly read like an episode of the Gilmore Girls.I was so emotionally drained after 3 hours of this crash course in recent Chinese history, a truly epic film, that I ate a pint of half-melted coffee ice cream and … watched the next film. Because my brain needed more pain.Joan Chen’s Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl is set in 1975. But this is no “Almost Famous” or Disco-era/American Pie-like reminiscence. The Cultural Youth Revolution was hard at work, a plague of fanaticism upon the land — I can hardly imagine such a thing in our fair democracy. Xiu Xiu (Lu Lu) is selected to be “sent down” from lovely Chengdu to a remote rural area, where as a city girl she can have her revolutionary values renewed by living with the proletariat, along with masses of other uniformed teenagers exiled from their homes by such directives.According to Headquarters, it’s “OK” for a tender, naive, innocent, homesick young girl to be sent even farther away to live in the patched, leaky tent of her trainer, a much older horse herder named Lao Jin (Lopsang), somewhere in the high steppes near Tibet, because he suffered a certain type of physical torture at the hands of enemies, involving a sharp knife, rendering him “harmless.” Sadly, this fate of his is not widely shared. A painful parable of the effects of the Cultural Revolution on generations of Chinese. I’m numb from this one.Amazing films, both. But don’t watch them in one sitting if you want to face your own pathetic issues with a sense of seriousness any time soon.