CANNES REPORT : A Top Year for Chinese-Language Film : Movies: Director Chen Kaige’s ‘Farewell to My Concubine’ is the hit of second half of the festival.

CANNES — Chen Kaige knows it’s not a preferred subject in this capital of frivolity, but he can’t help himself. “I’ve been in Cannes three times,” the thoughtful Chinese director says, looking at his hands, “and every time, I talk about the Cultural Revolution. I was an eyewitness to those events, I saw a lot of tragedy, I persecuted my own father. How could I pretend not to see anything?”

Chen’s nearly three-hour “Farewell to My Concubine,” a gorgeous, intoxicating epic that covers more than 50 years of modern Chinese history, has been the hit of the second half of the film festival. And, along with the exquisite but uncompromisingly static “The Puppetmaster” from Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao Hsien and the emotionally intimate, politically daring “The Blue Kite,” directed by Chen’s colleague, Tian Zhangzhuang, its presence marks an impressive watershed for Chinese-language cinema.

Called “a film about betrayal” by its director, who has lived in New York City and speaks excellent English, “Concubine” takes place between 1925 and 1979 in a beautifully recreated Beijing. Its multilayered story follows the lives of three characters as they connect with each other and their country’s complex and often painful history.

Two of the protagonists, Duan (Mainland actor Zhang Fengyi) and Cheng (Hong Kong pop star/heartthrob Leslie Cheung) meet in childhood when they are both apprenticed to a school that trains boys for roles in the highly stylized, all-male Beijing Opera.

Cheng, forced to play female roles because of his delicate features, becomes infatuated with the older Duan, an emotional attraction that deepens as the boys grow into men and become celebrated for singing the opera duet about a defeated emperor and his loyal mistress that gives the film its title.

Duan, however, has no more than a fraternal interest in the other man but is intoxicated by Juxian (Gong Li), a celebrated prostitute. Juxian and Cheng vie for Dang’s emotions as the country suffers through a variety of political and social upheavals that culminate in the anarchic period of the Cultural Revolution, when fanatical Red Guards launched a nationwide witch hunt that turned all of China into a raging sea.

“Concubine” star Gong Li is the biggest female Asian star in memory off her work in such films as “Raise the Red Lantern” and “Ju Dou,” and her appearance in Cannes gave her film a considerable media boost.

Elegant and very sure of herself, Gong in person is enough of a presence to turn the normally rambunctious Harvey Weinstein (whose Miramax will distribute “Concubine” in the United States) into the picture of almost awe-struck civility, able to say only, “It’s a great pleasure,” on being introduced to her.

Asked about her fame, an amused Gong said through a translator that she has the same transfixing effect back home. “It’s very scary, because there are so many Chinese people. When ‘Ju Dou’ opened in Shanghai, I was really mobbed. Fifty policeman were assigned to protect me, but that didn’t work because they all wanted to look at me instead of doing their job. So I nearly got squeezed.”

“Concubine” is set to open in China in July, and director Chen is only a little worried about the government’s response to his frank portrayal of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution because that period is officially out of favor now and “the people who are in charge all went through it.” Still, Chen’sexperiences, which he described in a book, “My Life and Times as a Red Guard,” are especially chilling.

“The Cultural Revolution started when I was a little boy, and lasted when I was 14 to when I was 24,” he says. “The Red Guards were all teen-agers, and on the one hand they were very pure and innocent in their dream of creating a new society. Even now, I like them for that. On the other hand, they beat people up, they destroyed culture, they were evil.”

Chen’s father, Chen Huaikai, was also a film director, but he had joined the nationalist Kuomintang in 1939 to oppose the invading Japanese, and, when the Cultural Revolution began, “that became a big political problem. He was denounced as a spy, a secret agent of the nationalists hiding on the Mainland.”

Red Guards from Chen Kaige’s school came to his house “and forced my mother to stand with her face to the wall for four hours. They destroyed everything of my family’s: furniture, radio, camera. But because they were the kings, the emperors of my school, I still wanted to join them. So I denounced my father in public, I said, ‘My father is a spy.’ I was told I should do it as a good child of Chairman Mao, but, after I did it, I couldn’t stand my father’s eyes. He stared at me with a look I can’t describe.”

Chen’s father (whose expertise as an opera film director led to his becoming artistic director on “Concubine”) was sent to work in the countryside for five years. When the Cultural Revolution ended after Mao’s death, Chen entered the first class in years to enroll at the Beijing Film Academy. He and classmates Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern”) and Tian Zhangzhuang (“Horse Thief”) became collectively known as the Fifth Generation, destined, its members hoped, to give their country a prominent position in world cinema. Although Chen’s first film, 1984’s “The Yellow Earth” (with Zhang Yimou as cinematographer), did just that, it also attracted official criticism for “showing the dark side of Chinese society to please Westerners. But we were very young, and we weren’t scared. We had lived through the Cultural Revolution, and we decided not to be afraid of anything.”

But walking the fine line between ruinous self-censorship and chilling governmental disapproval is still necessary for China’s directors.

Yet even being banned in China (as Zhang Yimou’s films were until recently, when the government expressed delight at his “The Story of Qiu Ju”) does not necessarily end one’s career. “Because of our reputations, whatever we do attracts a lot of attention, and it is risky to stop one of us. They don’t want to do that,” Chen explains. “If the film bureau says no to your script, you wait. It’s never the final decision. You have to find a way to convince them.”