What a film, definitely lives up to the hype.
What got me wasn't the historical sweep — though watching these characters get ground down by every political era China goes through is pretty relentless — it was how psychological the whole thing is underneath. Dieyi never really has a self that belongs to him. From the moment his mother leaves him at the opera school he gets shaped into something through repetition, punishment, and forced feminization. Being made to recite "I am by nature a girl, not a boy" until he internalizes it isn't really training; it's closer to identity erasure. And everything that follows kind of flows from that.
His obsession with Xiaolou makes more sense when you frame it that way too. Every attachment in his life ends in abandonment — his mother, his mentors, eventually Xiaolou himself during the Cultural Revolution. So the clinging isn't just romantic love, it's someone holding onto the one consistent thing that feels like home. Xiaolou is basically his entire sense of continuity.
The fate thread running through the film is subtle but it's everywhere once you notice it. Dieyi's mother was a prostitute. Xiaolou's wife is a prostitute. Dieyi spends his whole life playing a concubine who dies for her king. The opera they keep performing is literally a story about devotion ending in death. At some point you start wondering whether these characters are performing that story or just living it out, and whether there's even a difference.
One thing I kept thinking about though — and curious if others have thoughts on this — is how much the film actually commits to Dieyi's homosexuality as something real and legitimate versus treating it as a byproduct of his trauma and conditioning. Leslie Cheung himself said in interviews that the director Chen Kaige was uncomfortable with the gay themes and that expanding Juxian's role was partly to "balance" the queer elements. The novel apparently treats Dieyi's sexuality as simply who he is, but the film leaves it ambiguous enough that you could read his feelings as obsession or psychological damage rather than love. Which is a meaningful distinction.
Did Chen Kaige make a film about a gay man, or a film about a traumatized man whose trauma expresses itself through same-sex attachment? I'm not sure the film fully commits to an answer, and I think that ambiguity is both its most interesting quality and its biggest weakness depending on how you look at it.
Anyway. Worth watching if you haven't. Just a lot going on beneath the surface.