I’d say it’s that slight cartoonishness that makes this feel so much better than the modern adaptations I watched, which try so hard to feel cool that they drop the magic. If you can get past the production value, which looks like it came from the 50s, and some buffoonish combat scenes, the writing turns out to be excellent, and it truly delivers on that feeling of epic that you might get from old Ben-Hur. It was produced by Zhang Yimou and features Gong Li - the omnipresent star of Fifth Generation Chinese cinema and the leading woman in Farewell My Concubine - as Liu Bang’s wife, Lü Zhi. Then he cuts his own throat and dies.įarewell My Concubine is by far the best-known of the modern renditions of this story and a classic by all accounts, but I watched three other films about Xiang Yu, and my personal favorite out of those was The Great Conqueror’s Concubine 西楚霸王 from 1994. In a final stand, Xiang Yu single-handedly kills a hundred men and an enemy colonel, proving that he has lost not for lack of military prowess. Xiang Yu sings a song blaming Heaven for his downfall, fearing what will become of his lover. This is the Peking Opera scene in Farewell My Concubine. They become trapped in the city of Gaixia with their dwindling army. Xiang Yu brings his paramour, Lady Yu, to every fight. More rebellions and alliances among the old kingdoms feed the rise of Liu Bang, and despite Xiang Yu winning battles against Liu Bang again and again, he loses ground. He’s 26.īut over the next four years, the tides turn. Our hero has achieved the impossible - in only three years he has risen to command China almost entirely of his own skill and ambition. Then he kills the Qin emperor and burns the palace and all its priceless history to the ground. Liu Bang runs away and Xiang Yu takes the palace. ![]() Many say that moment was the beginning of the end for Xiang Yu. Furious, Xiang Yu invites Liu Bang to a banquet to kill him, but mysteriously (fatedly?), the typically hot-tempered hero is suddenly lenient, and lets him go. While Xiang Yu is busy defeating an army of 300,000 Qin soldiers and then burying his 200,000 Qin prisoners alive, Liu Bang gets there first. The king declares that the first army to enter the old Qin palace would rule it. The new Chu king places Xiang Yu as a leader of one army, and gives another army to the peasant leader Liu Bang. ![]() Xiang Yu, born from a line of Chu generals, rises rapidly in the rebellion on account of his bold and fearsome prowess. The story goes like this: Years of stringent Qin rule has led to widespread peasant rebellion. The story of Xiang Yu and Liu Bang has been told and retold for 2,000 years, and it has been the subject of dozens of TV shows, films, and plays. Xiang Yu deposed the Qin Dynasty to rule as the Hegemon-King for four years, and ultimately fell to Liu Bang - the founder of the Han Dynasty - at the will of Heaven. ![]() Lady Yu was the lover of Xiang Yu, the man who contended with Liu Bang for control of China. ![]() What Western audiences miss - as I first did - is that this Peking Opera they are performing is a famous one, and moreover the characters in that drama belong to a historical legend that lives widely in the Chinese popular imagination. In Chen Kaige’s sweeping Farewell My Concubine, a male Peking opera actor plays the tragic Lady Yu and yearns for the heroic romance to be real - in the play and in life he is in ill-fated love with the man on stage.
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