Forever Enthralled is biography of man as woman

It is a lavish biography of Mei Lan-fang, one of the Peking Opera’s most celebrated stars, a male performer who specialised in the female parts that were never given to women in the pre-war heyday of the opera.

Its best sequences come when Wang, his teacher, trains the young Mei in his art, before a competition is organised between the master and his pupil.

Thereafter, Kaige concentrates on Mei’s marriage to a business-minded woman, his affair with a female star specialising in male roles (Zhidi Zhang, the one superstar in the film) and his refusal to perform for the admiring Japanese invaders during World War II.

While all this is intriguing, it is the production design, the costumes and the cinematography that remain in the memory.
Kaige’s themes are clearly the relationship of the artist to his art, the tensions between artists and their less than subtle audiences and the essential loneliness of the dedicated Mei’s efforts to perfect his skill.

Kaige has proved that an epic Chinese period piece is still relevant today.
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Forever Enthralled