Farewell my fantasy

In this essay, I seek to place Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine not solely within the Chinese matrix of its production but within the transnational matrix of its distribution and viewing; indeed, the film may well have been intended for international audiences, to which the film's numerous awards testify. Yet China, too, has been fascinated with Western ideas, with Freud one particular example. So here I use a Freudian interpretation of the film's rationalization of homosexuality in terms of beating and childhood sexuality, a rationalization that diverges from the Lilian Lee novel on which the film is based.