Peking Opera Blues
At a glance...
- Directed by Tsui Hark
- Released in 1986
- Runtime 104 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: operatic gender transgression fun!
Peking Opera Blues is a delight and a surprise. It starts out as a ragtag team hijinks story full of jokes and gags and goofs, but looming in the background is the revolutionary instinct against the corrupt warlords and their militias. Situate that around the setting of the Chinese opera and specifically the gender performance of the opera actors and the characters themselves, and you have yourself a really special film.
Every escalation of drama, tension, and violence is connected back to the performance of gender. Cross-dressing heartthrob Tsao Wan is the most obvious example of this; she is the daughter of the powerful general who has assumed control of the town, and she secretly works in shadows to undermine his rule. She explains that she dresses like a man purely because it is useful to her, because it lets her move about unnoticed. In this way, She is the most directly like the dao ma dan1 of the theater, perhaps even surpassing them. Because she has an assumed "real" femininity to fall back on, Tsao Wan can use gender purely as a tool to her pragmatic ends. She is empowered by her ability to cross-over into anonymous masculinity, and then in the presence of her father she can return back to the safety of her role as beloved daughter.
On the other side, the actor Fa experiences an inversion of Tsao Wan's genderplay. A minor character in terms of runtime, Fa represents the whole cast of actors in the theater which exists as the fulcrum of this theme of gender subversion in Peking Opera Blues. A skilled actor, Fa is referred to both as she and he in the English subtitles, depending on who is talking to or about her. Are these actors mere women-impersonators, or are they perhaps women themselves? At all times when she is on stage, the dao ma dan crosses over into becoming a woman in the eyes of the audience. However, when the commander of the police force takes an eye to Fa and sends her a command to marry him in 3 days, she cannot escape by declaring that she is man, nor can she escape by saying she doesn't want to be married or that she prefers women. Unlike Tsao Wan, her performance has deadly consequence, her transgression is not effortlessly removed, and no one in her life has the power to make Commander Liu stop. Her only recourse is to literally flee, which allows the third piece of this gender-confused puzzle to finally enter the spotlight.
Bai Niu is the daughter of the opera house owner, and she is forbidden from performing in any plays. Even going in blind, you come to understand that her tension with her father and the actors is of the same thread as Tsao Wan and Fa. She is woman, and not a skilled woman-impersonator, and so she cannot take a place on stage. She is instead conscripted to clean and watch from afar, until Commander Liu's "offer" to Fa causes the lead actress to opt to flee "to a small town" somewhere, she hopes. This failure of safety, the failure of Bai Niu's father to protect Fa from the powerful forces that seek to exploit and degrade his workers sets in motion a series of events that ultimately catapult this movie beyond swashbuckling farce into a daring treatise on power, resistance, and camaraderie in the face of overwhelming oppression. As Fa embraces Bai Niu and leaves through the window, she gives verbal permission to the woman to put on the makeup and become an actor. The consequences of this empowerment reverberate throughout the whole film and reoccur as performed femininity becomes the site of exploitation and of resistance over and over again.
From this standpoint, Peking Opera Blues springs to life with gay over- and undertones, with humor, and always returning back to the arena of gender performance, subversion, and defiance: the opera house. Something about that scene where two cis women who are impersonating as women-impersonators take turns on stage declaring themselves as real while the other is fake, all while a male actor properly fulfilling her role as a dao ma dan grimaces to her boss and the audience because she's the only one who is supposed to be on stage just kinda blows my mind? I think this movie is worth seeing even if you know nothing about Chinese opera, but now that I have read just a little bit more about the history of the setting and the theater2, I eagerly await my next chance to watch this again. Plus, the song interludes slap.
the original Chinese name of this film is 刀马旦, literally "sword and horse role" (though I have seen the third character dan also translated as diva in some of the Chinese language youtube videos I have been watching about Peking opera), which is the name of one such role in Chinese opera of a young warrior woman that was, traditionally, always played by men. Feel free to do as I did and fall down the rabbit hole a little bit into the history of Chinese opera. Put this as another item on the list to motivate me to pick up Mandarin Chinese again!
If you go in blind like I did, you may be tempted to believe that the revolution represented by Tsao Wan is the Communist revolution, but this movie is not set in the right time period for that. Instead, Tsao Wan's revolution is the revolution against the dynastic rule over China that was led by the first iteration of the Guomingdang, or the KMT, which in its early days had both left and right wing factions within the organization, before ultimately becoming the nationalist faction that you might recognize from films like A Brighter Summer Day after they lost to the Communists in the civil war and fled to Taiwan. Tsui Hark made this movie as Hong Kong's return from British rule back to mainland China was imminent, which as Toronto film critic Rachel Ho explains in an interesting essay for The Asian Cut, puts the old city in upheaval in the film directly in relationship to the current one on the mind of every Hongkonger contemporary to the movie's release.