![]() ![]() (Another movie opening this fall, " Farewell My Concubine," features a Peking opera star who is quite convincing as a woman.) Gallimard is played by Jeremy Irons, the screen's poet of tortured sexuality, and no one else could have done a better job of suggesting the inverted obsession that leads him to fixate on a "woman" who keeps him always at arm's length. ![]() There is even dialogue in which Song Liling observes that in Peking Opera, all women are traditionally played by men. Butterfly" keeps the secret, not from the audience, but only from Gallimard. Unlike " The Crying Game," which created a successful deception, "M. John Lone, as Song Liling, the transvestite opera star, does not make a convincing female, and is perhaps not intended to. In the screen version, it is impossible to create the illusion. On the stage, the audience could be blind, as well. His self-deception sets the stage for the play's drama, in which the Asian butterfly is victorious, for once, over the visiting European. He so desperately required this person to be the butterfly of his dreams that he was simply blind to all other evidence. This explanation sounds like romantic idealism, but Hwang suggests, more darkly, that Gallimard also was blinded by his white Western fantasies about a submissive Asian woman. ![]()
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