Cultural-exchange item from China. On the receiving end, it demonstrates that trendy cinematography can freely cross the Pacific and that the doors of Mainland China are wide open to it: the gently teetering Steadicam, the oozing light, the muted color, the soft focus, the powdery atmosphere, etc. Half the time you feel as if you're blindly groping through a parti-colored sandstorm. (The infamous House of Blossoms, for example, is not just decorated in red, and lit in red, but filled with it, choked with it, obscured with it: red dust.) On the giving end, it offers us an "epical" (i.e., two-and-a-half hours in length, half a century in scope) and "accessible" (i.e., vulgar, conventional) storyline such as might have been devised by a sort of Sino-Sidney Sheldon. Two young boys form a bond of buddyhood in a brutalizing school of the theatrical arts in the 1920s, a bond that sustains them into mutually flourishing careers in the Peking Opera (one of them takes the male roles, the other takes the female), but a bond that is strained and finally snapped by a gold-digging courtesan as well as by the historical upheavals of the 20th Century. The movie, maintaining a heavy schedule of child abandonment, child abuse, rape, betrayal, drug addiction, war, collaboration with the enemy, courtroom drama, suicide, and so forth, cannot spare much time for actual opera (a half-hour, it should be noted, was cut for U.S. import), though that's dependably the most riveting material. With Zhang Fengyi, Leslie Cheung, and Gong Li; directed by Chen Kaige. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.