Farewell My Concubine 霸王别姬 (1993): The Only Film Where Dying on Stage Was a Happy Ending

There is a film that has sat at the top of Douban's rankings for three decades. Number two, to be exact. Right behind The Shawshank Redemption.

It has a 9.6 rating. Over 2.5 million reviews. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993—the only Chinese film ever to do so. It was banned in China, then released, then banned again. It made Leslie Cheung an icon. And it has never been remade, because no one would dare.

Farewell My Concubine is not a film you enjoy. It is a film you survive.

You sit through its 171 minutes, and by the end, you understand something about art, about love, and about the quiet cruelty of history. But the strangest thing? The ending—the one where the protagonist pulls a real sword across her throat on stage—is not a tragedy. For her, it is the only happy ending possible.

This is the paradox at the heart of Chen Kaige's masterpiece. And today, I want to unpack it.

Part One: What Is This Film?

Let's start with the basics.

Farewell My Concubine is a historical drama spanning more than fifty years of 20th-century Chinese history. It follows two Peking opera singers—Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi)—from their brutal childhood training in the 1920s through the Japanese occupation, the Chinese Civil War, the founding of the People's Republic, and finally the Cultural Revolution.

The opera they perform together is called Farewell My Concubine. It tells the story of the real-life Concubine Yu, who kills herself after her lover, the warrior king Xiang Yu, faces defeat in battle. "The king has exhausted his courage," she says. "What reason do I have to live?"

In the film, Dieyi plays the Concubine. Xiaolou plays the King. And over fifty years, Dieyi slowly becomes the Concubine—on stage and off.

The film was adapted from Lilian Lee's novel of the same name. Chen Kaige directed it. Leslie Cheung, who had never performed Peking opera before, trained for six months in Beijing. By the time filming began, he could perform the entire opera himself. No body double was used for the opera scenes.

Part Two: The Performance That Became a Prophecy

Let me say this clearly: Leslie Cheung's performance in this film is one of the greatest in cinema history.

He plays Cheng Dieyi as a man who has been broken so many times that he no longer knows where the breaking ends and the healing begins. His eyes—soft, haunted, perpetually on the verge of tears—tell a story that the dialogue never touches.

Cheung was a pop star before this film. A teen idol. The kind of actor you put in romantic comedies. But in Farewell My Concubine, he transformed. He learned the opera. He learned the gestures. He learned to walk like a woman, to hold his hands like a woman, to be a woman on stage.

And then, tragically, art imitated life.

In 2003, ten years after the film's release, Leslie Cheung died by suicide. He jumped from the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong. He left behind a note that said, "I have been suffering from depression. I am very tired."

When fans watch Farewell My Concubine today, they cannot separate the character from the actor. Cheng Dieyi dies on stage, by her own hand, because she cannot live without her king. Leslie Cheung died in real life, by his own hand, because he could no longer bear the weight of his own mind.

The film became a prophecy.

And that is part of why it haunts us still[citation:5].

Part Three: The Three Characters Trapped in a Story They Didn't Choose

Farewell My Concubine is not a love triangle. It is a love knot—three people tied together so tightly that cutting any one of them destroys the whole.

Cheng Dieyi: The True Concubine

Dieyi is the film's tragic center. As a child, he was called Xiaodouzi. His mother, a prostitute, could not keep him. She took him to the Peking opera troupe, cut off his extra finger (a symbol of his unwanted masculinity), and left him there forever.

In the troupe, he was forced to learn female roles because of his delicate features. He was forced to recite the line "I am a girl, not a boy" until he believed it. He was sexually abused by a powerful patron. And through it all, he clung to one person: his senior apprentice, Shitou—the boy who would become Duan Xiaolou.

For Dieyi, the opera is not a performance. It is reality. When he sings "Farewell My Concubine," he is the Concubine. When he looks at Xiaolou, he sees his King. And when Xiaolou marries a woman named Juxian (Gong Li), Dieyi feels the betrayal as if his own husband had taken a mistress.

The critic who reviewed this film for The College of Wooster put it perfectly: "Cheng Dieyi's final suicide shows that he would rather die heroically like Concubine Yu than live like Duan Xiaolou in a society without backbone"[citation:8].

Duan Xiaolou: The False King

Xiaolou is the film's realist. He loves Dieyi, yes—but as a brother, not as a lover. He respects the opera, but he knows it is a performance. When the political tides turn, he bends. When the Red Guards demand confessions, he confesses. When they ask him to denounce Dieyi, he denounces Dieyi. When they ask him to denounce his wife, he denounces his wife.

"I'm a false king," he admits. "You're the true concubine."

He is not evil. He is weak. And in the crucible of history, weakness and evil are indistinguishable.

The same critic writes: "Duan Xiaolou is clear that he is a false king. On stage, he is someone—he is Xiang Yu. But in real life, he is nothing"[citation:8].

Juxian: The Woman Who Loved a Ghost

Juxian (Gong Li) is the film's most overlooked character, and perhaps its most tragic.

She was a prostitute when she met Xiaolou. He rescued her from a violent customer, and she threw herself at him—not out of desperation, but out of strategy. She wanted a life. She wanted a husband. She wanted to escape the brothel.

She got all of those things. But she also got Dieyi.

For years, Juxian and Dieyi circle each other like wolves. They are rivals for Xiaolou's affection. They snipe at each other. They scheme against each other. But in the end, they are the same: two people who love a man who cannot love them back the way they need.

When Xiaolou denounces Juxian during the Cultural Revolution, she walks home, puts on her wedding dress, and hangs herself.

She is the film's forgotten concubine. And her death is no less tragic than Dieyi's[citation:3].

Part Four: The Scene That Will Never Leave You

I have watched Farewell My Concubine five times. And every time, I dread the same sequence.

It is the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards have gathered the opera troupe in a courtyard. They have set up a bonfire. They have torn down the costumes. And they are forcing Xiaolou and Dieyi to denounce each other.

What follows is a slow, excruciating unraveling.

Xiaolou goes first. He lists Dieyi's "crimes"—performing for the Japanese, being close to a capitalist, being "corrupted by bourgeois ideals." Each accusation is a knife. Dieyi, stunned, says nothing.

Then it is Dieyi's turn. And he makes a choice.

He does not denounce Xiaolou. Instead, he denounces Juxian. He calls her a prostitute. He says she seduced Xiaolou. He says she is a "poisonous snake."

And then Xiaolou, pushed beyond all reason, shouts: "I don't love her! I never loved her!"

The camera cuts to Juxian's face. She is not crying. She is gone. The light has left her eyes.

She walks through the fire. She picks up the sword—the same sword Dieyi has been chasing for forty years—and carries it away.

That sword will be her death. And Dieyi's. And, in a way, Xiaolou's[citation:1].

Part Five: Why "Dying on Stage" Is a Happy Ending

Now, back to the paradox I promised at the beginning.

At the end of the film, Xiaolou and Dieyi are old men. The Cultural Revolution is over. They are rehearsing Farewell My Concubine one last time—not for an audience, but for themselves.

They sing the lines. They perform the gestures. And then, in the final moment of the opera, Dieyi pulls a real sword from the prop table. She draws it across her throat. She falls.

Xiaolou screams. "Dieyi! Dieyi!"

And then, quietly: "Xiaodouzi."

The childhood name. The name of the boy who entered the opera troupe all those years ago, before the abuse, before the trauma, before the love that could never be returned.

Dieyi is dead. But she is also free.

She has spent her entire life trapped—trapped in the wrong body, trapped in the wrong century, trapped in love with a man who could not love her back. The only place she has ever felt whole is on that stage, playing the Concubine. And now, finally, she has made the performance real.

She has chosen her own ending. She has become the character completely. And in doing so, she has escaped the world that never understood her.

The critic from the Chinese Youth Network wrote: "To destroy the suffering subject is to refuse the suffering itself"[citation:1]. Dieyi does not die because she is sad. She dies because she has finally become herself.

That is not a tragedy.

That is liberation.

Final Thoughts

Farewell My Concubine is not an easy film. It is not a pleasant film. It is 171 minutes of emotional devastation, punctuated by some of the most beautiful imagery ever committed to celluloid.

But it is also a necessary film.

It asks us: What does it mean to love something so completely that you lose yourself in it? What does it mean to live through a century of violence, and still find something worth dying for? What does it mean to be "true" when the world demands that you be false?

Cheng Dieyi's answer was death. But her death was not a surrender. It was a final, defiant act of self-creation.

The Concubine kills herself because her king has fallen. But Dieyi kills herself because—for the first time in her life—she has finally become the king.

Have you seen Farewell My Concubine? Do you think Dieyi's death is tragic—or triumphant? Let me know in the comments.

Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬