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Crossroads of identity and espionage, drag of romantic illusion. "An adventurous imperialist," the French attaché (Jeremy Irons) in '60s Beijing, praising the beguiling diva (John Lone) following a rendition of Puccini and getting in return an excoriating treatise on the white devil's patriarchal fantasies. "The submissive Oriental woman," burlesqued at home by the wife (Barbara Sukowa) with magazine in hand like a bashful fan, pursued as the exotic ideal by the diplomat in a two-decade affair. The lady speaks in a purr and is too demure to remove her costume, the deception reveals a male spy who connects the mission to operatic Chinese travesty "because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act." Political regimes shift but the enigmas of bodies are eternal, the masquerade of cultivated artifice extends to David Cronenberg's filmmaking in a dry impersonation of a prestigious adaptation. Gift of dragonflies, picnic on the Great Wall, blinkered Western adoration reflected in Parisian student protests. Gender performance is one of the arts promptly outlawed by the Chairman, off to work camps once the assignment is finished: "You are all here because you do not know how to dig into the flinty soil of China and discover its revolutionary future." Reality is forced out in a courtroom and laid bare in the back of a police truck, nothing left for the protagonist to do but reenact the lyrical tragedy he imagines himself to live in. "You've shown me your true self. But what I loved was the lie. A perfect lie... that's been destroyed." Cronenberg's A Patriot for Me, as it were, with Vertigo and The Bitter Tea of General Yen in striking evidence. The climax spills bloody vérité into the smeared makeup, the curtain drop is a shut door on a departing airplane. With Ian Richardson, Annabel Leventon, Shizuko Hoshi, Vernon Dobtcheff, and Richard McMillan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |