Wutai jiemei

Like a handsome Bollywood epic, Two Stage Sisters a film by Jin Xie has something for everyone -- sympathetic heroines, evil capitalists, great music, Hollywood-style melodrama, and revolutionary fervor. Set in pre-Revolutionary China, it is a tragic melodrama with strong political overtones. Though revolutionary in spirit, the film was banned after its debut for "bourgeois humanism", ostensibly making the reactionary sister seem too sympathetic. The director himself was imprisoned at the start of the Cultural Revolution.

In Two Stage Sisters, a runaway peasant girl, Zhu Chunhua (Fang Xie), is taken in by an opera troupe and meets Xing Yuehong (Yindi Cao) and her kind father, Master Xing. When the father dies, the two actresses go to Shanghai and perform in the Shaoxing Opera, displacing the former singer, Miss Shang (Yunzhu Shangguan) who grows bitter and resentful towards the manager, Master Tang. Yuehong and Chunhua become close friends but it is obvious they are moving in different directions. Chunhua meets a revolutionary cadre who points out how women are exploited and oppressed, making sure to point out that its not just the fault of the bosses but their bosses and beyond that, the Americans.

Chunhua attends political meetings and becomes involved in the Revolution while Yuehong marries Master Tang and lives in style - wearing Western clothes, high heels, elaborate headdresses, and makeup. When Chunhua refuses to stop a play objected to by the bosses, she is assaulted and comes face to face in court with Yuehong who is forced to testify against her, setting the stage for a dramatic climax. Powerful and involving, Two Stage Sisters is an important film and a rare treat for the senses.

I first heard of this film in the late 1970s ... but didn't manage to see it for decades and decades. When I did it was worth the wait.

It has an amazing history: first produced in PRC in 1964 ... but then squashed by the extremist "Gang of Four" (including Mao's wife) who were behind the unbelievably cataclysmic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Only long after that "gang" had been replaced did the PRC leaders gingerly accept that it could be re-released in the late 1970s.

The irony (although not a surprise) is that this film is extremely supportive of the Revolution, which starts happening right at the end. It also depicts pretty well the poverty/oppression which was the main lot of most Chinese people before the Revolution.

The objection of the Cultural Revolutionaries was that the film was not the kind of film ardent Communist film-makers should be making: workers proud of fulfilling their monthly quotas in tractor factories, etc. The form of the film also struck them as too Hollywoodian, bourgeois, slavish to the cultural hegemony of the USA, etc. Etc. (this is the kind of language people used back then).

The two "sisters" here are not in fact sisters. And their ideals and aspirations diverge in the course of the film. In fact one of the most revolutionary aspects of this film is that it shows women making choices about their lives, making it more modern and compelling than most 1960s films produced anywhere, including the English-speaking countries.

I also found the depiction of Chinese theatre/opera here, as performed by the touring troupe, absolutely thrilling: Chinese opera is so strange to Western eyes and ears, but so beautiful. I hope it still survives and is popular... but I have some fears.

Over the decades I have developed a strange attitude towards films: the ability of a film to depict sociological or political realities of another time and place can often provide the main interest of a film for me. But also an individual film's genesis or specific history, which is rarely as special as this one's, can influence how much interest I have in watching something.