RECOMMENDED MOVIES

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Farewell My Concubine (Mandarin with English & Chinese Subtitles(1993)

From The New Yorker
Chen Kaige's film is a big, eventful historical soap opera of the "Doctor Zhivago" school-the sort of drama that uses the unsettled emotional lives of a handful of characters to portray the human cost of war and of constant political upheaval. The movie follows a pair of male Beijing Opera performers, Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) and Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi), from their school days, in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties, to their farewell performance together, in 1977. Duan (who plays warriors and kings) and Cheng (who plays the important female roles) have an ideal relationship onstage, but offstage they often seem less like mythic lovers than like miserable, muddling-through partners in an arranged marriage. Chen keeps the action charging forward breathlessly, for more than two and a half hours, and at a certain point you begin to realize that the obvious theatre-versus-life ironies are only a small part of what the movie is about. The real subject is whether it's possible, in times that demand perpetual revolutions in values, to remain true to anyone or anything: an art, an ideal, a friend, a wife, oneself. Also with Gong Li. Screenplay by Lilian Lee and Lu Wei. Co-winner of the Golden Palm at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. In Mandarin. -Terrence Rafferty      Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

Plot Summary: China in the 1920's. After her father's death, nineteen year old Songlian is forced to marry Chen Zuoqian, the lord of a powerful family. Fifty year old Chen has already three wives, each of them living in separate houses within the great castle. The competition between the wives is tough, as their master's attention carries power, status and privilege. Each night Chen must decide with which wife to spend the night and a red lantern is lit in front of the house of his choice. And each wife schemes and plots to make sure it's hers. However, things get out of hand... Written by Mattias Pettersson {seaman@sbbs.se}

The Last Emperor (1987)

Plot Synopsis: A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Mandarin with English & Chinese Subtitles) This movie is difficult to find in the United States, so the following link has been provided.