Farewell my concubine Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Farewell my concubine - Essay Example The two boys Shitou and Douzi are handed over by their parents to live in a strict training school for the opera in Beijing. The regime there is very harsh, and the boys are trained to perform very stylized roles which require heavy makeup and rigid types of characterization. Douzi is chosen to perform female characters, which involves him training his voice to sound like a woman, and repeating a very significant line which states that he is a girl by nature and not a boy. He has difficulty getting the words out, and repeatedly stumbles over that line, saying that he is a boy and not a girl. He is beaten and punished for this mistake, and the violence of his teacher is a way of showing how forceful communism came to be. The repressive era of the Cultural Revolution in the period between 1966 and 1976 forced people to conform to a rigid moral and social code of behavior, and punished people who resisted by beating them or banishing them to distant places, or even prisons. The training of the boys and the effect it had upon them is a kind of metaphor for the way that China suffered under the Cultural Revolution. The film shows how the two boys grow up to identify with people who are outcasts and oppressed.