M Butterfly [VHS]
![M Butterfly [VHS]](/images/M-Butterfly-VHS-6303031897-L.jpg)
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VHS Movie Reviews of M Butterfly [VHS]
Movie Review: Tragic and sympathetic characters caught up in history
Summary: 5 Stars
This 1993 film is based on the true story of French diplomat, Rene Gallimard, who carried on an affair for 18 years with Chinese opera singer Song Liling. Later, he was arrested when it was discovered he was passing diplomatic secrets to the Chinese government through his lover. However, there is a twist. Song Liling was actually a man, not a woman, and supposedly kept this fact from Gallimard through all this time.Jeremy Irons is cast as Rene Gallimard. John Lone, who was actually trained in the Beijing opera and who played the title role in The Last Emperor, is cast as Song Liling. He is not a convincing female but I feel this was the director's intent. The story is, after all, about Gallimard's blind obsession in his desire for the perfect woman. Both Irons' and Lone's performances are magnificent. Both are tragic and sympathetic characters caught up in history.
The theme is also about the role of men and women as well as Communist China and the cultural revolution. Great cinematography and setting brings us to the heart of China which is going through its growing pains. Deception and betrayal are everywhere, not just between the two leading characters involved in the romance.
I was unprepared to like the video as much as I did. It did not do well at the box office, I knew the theme in advance and felt it would strain my belief system. However, I was swept away in the story and the excellent performances and had no trouble overlooking its flaws. Of course the author took dramatic license and created a ending that played like an opera, but who is to blame him; the story itself just cried out for theatrics.
Recommended as an interesting departure from the ordinary.
Movie Review: Cronenberg and Irons: Masterful
Summary: 5 Stars
A bit of a departure for horror/sci-fi director David Cronenberg, but nonetheless one of his best films. Jeremy Irons plays Rene Gallimard, an accountant for the French Embassy in Beijing, who becomes infatuated with a Chinese diva (Song Liling), played by John Lone. After a passionate and scandalous affair, Song leaves Beijing, supposedly pregnant with Gallimard's child. Years later when he is arrested for espionage, Gallimard is forced to confront the fact that not only was his lover a spy for the Chinese ministry, but a man. Some people find John Lone's inability to completely pass as a woman problematic, but as Cronenberg explains: "I didn't want an unknown who was incredibly female and almost undetectable. I wanted a man. When Gallimard and Song are kissing I wanted it to be two men. I wanted the audience to feel that... M. Butterfly for me is about transformation.." For me, it's a brilliant exploration of the nature of curiousity and desire that necessarily ends tragically. The devastating notion that you can give up your entire life for something that is not true, that it's possible to fall in love with an idea, an image, a masquerade. Cronenberg abounds in his insights to imperialism, gender performance and the human capcity for transformation. Still, above all is the emotional intensity of this film, his best (in that regard) to date. Beautiful cinematography and exquisite acting, earns five stars for the closing scene alone. Highly recommended.Movie Review: All best talents gathered to show a new angle.
Summary: 5 Stars
If you love drama, theatres, films, arts, history and all that you know that this version is a brilliant piece of artistic work, not a historical work. The scriptwriter is a billiant playwright, very obviously. John Lone has a Tony, and same as Jeremy, and you have a very talented Director. What the Director wants to show is that he is doing a very "new angle" that history has missed out, and you don't get that unless you watch them very carefully of how each of the most talented individual in their own rights is adding a very subtle "new edge" about the true story that has happened in the past. I would rather think the future viewers of our next generation will get it. Don't write it off yet. It's more than sci-fi.Movie Review: Terms of ambivalence
Summary: 5 Stars
At first glance, M Butterfly seems predicated upon the classical narrative of white coloniazation, whereby the colonized other is constituted metonymically along the lines of categorical displacements such as femininity-Asia-otherness-desire. Inverting the premises of this chain of supplementation seems to be the point of the film. Its ambivalence in relation to the colonial discourse is contingent on the promise, and the threat, contained in the letter M: a reference implying Western reference to gender, yet ultimately betraying any claim to the existence of epistemological grounds to understanding gender. Inverting the positions of the subject, and the object, of the colonial discourse, profoundly questioning the relation between race and sex, the drama still maintains its traditional end, but adds a non-traditional twist to it.Movie Review: Cognitive Dissonance
Summary: 3 Stars
There are two major things to be said about this one.First off: Regarding the complaints that John Lone was "too male" to pass for a woman. Well if people were actually listening to what was being said, they would realize that the point of the film was that Western preoccupations with stereotypes and the "Idea" of an Asian woman, blind us from the reality of what is actually before us. John's "maleness" not only is not a detraction from the film, it should have driven the point home even more strongly.
Which brings us to the second point. David Henry Huang had some very specific points to make with his script and indeed the Screenplay is remarkably faithful to the stage script. Unfortunately I think David Cronenberg's interests in filming this one were very different from Huang's interests in writing it. What we are given is two brilliant artists tackling the same material together but with very different agendas. These differences unfortunately do not gell and we are left with neither agenda being adaquately served. Sadly, a less visionary director may have served Huang's vision better.