Chen Kaige
4 titles · chinese fifth generation
Two boys enter a Peking opera school in 1924 in Farewell My Concubine, and the friendship that starts there runs on through nearly seventy years of Chinese history with no interest in protecting it. Chen films private devotion under political weather and lets the weather win. Little else of his is in the catalogue: Killing Me Softly, an English-language thriller about a woman who marries a mountaineer she has just met, and The Battle at Lake Changjin, a Korean War epic made at state scale that looks at the same century from the side doing the grinding. The first is three hours of watching a life taken apart in instalments.
Signature
- Private loyalty tested across decades of political reversal.
- Opera, performance and ritual framing who a person is allowed to be.
- One relationship carried across an enormous historical span.
- Later work on co-directed national epics, see Tsui Hark.
fit
