CW: This post contains discussion of suicide.
I recently had the good fortune to spend an unreasonable amount of time at the Taipei Film Festival. The festival featured everything from the opening two episodes of the soon-to-air, locally produced mystery series The Leaking Bookstore 滴水的推理書屋, to some of the top short films by local university students, and even a film that rather prominently features Swiss cows.
But the films that left the greatest impression on me were those of Qiu Jiongjiong 邱炯炯, the 2022 Festival’s “Filmmaker in Focus.” Raised in a family of Sichuan opera performers, a veteran of Beijing arts circles, and now based out of Shenzhen, Qiu Jiongjiong is something of an outlier in China’s contemporary art and film worlds. His works evade categorization within the “generation system” used to classify many contemporary Chinese filmmakers. He frequently eschews the hyper-saturated color palettes of contemporary HD filmmaking in favor of stark black and white, minimally edited footage. And his corpus highlights many of the elements of Chinese society that the current regime would rather go unnoticed.
Though Qiu’s films touch on a range of subjects—from the deeply personal to the farcical—traditional Sichuan opera is a thread that connects almost all of the films by Qiu that I saw at this year’s festival. Whether documentary or fiction, many of Qiu’s films directly feature the music or performers of Sichuan opera. And even where opera doesn’t feature directly, my impression is that Qiu’s operatic heritage continues to shape his filmmaking practice: he favors the theatrical over the cinematic, the stylized over the naturalistic, and the gift of the gab over the focus-grouped scripts of most studio films.
For the rest of today’s post, I’ll be talking about Qiu’s 2010 film Madame 姑奶奶, a documentary about the Chinese drag queen Bilan de Linphel. (This film is not widely available on DVD, but I can neither confirm nor deny that it is available—with subtitles—on the streaming platforms YouTube and Bilibili.) This documentary not only exemplifies many of the defining features of Qiu’s films I mention above, it also opens up space to think about the rapidly changing role of art in contemporary China.
The Madame Holds Court
Madame is composed almost entirely of alternations between Bilan de Linphel’s stage performances, and a series of interviews with Fan Qihui 樊其辉, Bilan’s off-stage identity.
The interviews, shot as tight, single-camera close-ups, mainly take place in the backstage changing room at the cabaret that hosts Bilan’s performances. Told with a casual flair for the theatrical, the performer’s tales range from the bitter to the witty and from the mundane to the outrageous. Whether directly addressing the camera, or munching pensively on a popsicle, Fan is seemingly completely in their element in front of the camera lens, holding court with the unseen, unheard filmmakers.1
Told in unabashed, often discomfiting detail, Fan’s/Bilan’s origin story is that of a young queer person who struggled to find acceptance for their sexuality, both from others and themselves. Raised in a family environment that offered neither financial nor emotional stability, Fan ended up travelling intermittently to the Southeast coast of China, where they aspired to work in the gay sex industry. Even this desire was stymied, however, by the realization that they would never reach the top of their trade, and would be forced instead to rely on handouts from the more in-demand workers on the scene.
Never one not to kiss and tell, Fan’s story is one of a never-ending quest for love, bolstered by details of tricks turned late at night in parks, punctuated by darkly humorous tales of the indignities of clinic treatments following certain choice encounters, and spiced up by Fan’s impressive power of recall for the intimate physical details of their many sexual partners.
The Madame Holds Forth
When not zoomed in on the rather ordinary figure of Fan Qihui, the camera lens strains to contain the larger-than-life figure of Bilan de Linphel in all her performative glory.
In some ways, Bilan is classic drag: power ballads, biting stage patter, and wigs built on roughly the same scale as the container ship that blocked the Suez Canal in 2021. (Fan explains in one interview that Bilan’s wigs—large even by the voluminous standards of drag—need to be that size to make her head look smaller.)
But make no mistake. This is no glamorized, sanitized, neo-liberal, post-RuPaul drag. Bilan’s drag is a barebones, one-woman show. The dresses may be sequined with the best of them (Fan was in fact a famous costume designer by day), but no effort is made to hide the male body underneath the (often sheer) fabric. The mascara and eyeshadow are not so much artfully applied as liberally slathered (the better to create tracks down her cheeks when Bilan inevitably moves herself to tears with her own performance.)
There is no lip-synching to be found here. Bilan’s sings live, holding forth through an expressive mixture of music, stage patter, and remonstrations with her perpetually temperamental microphone, all the while accompanied by an astonishingly accomplished cabaret pianist who turns the venue’s honky-tonk piano into an instrument of almost symphonic potential.
Despite the fact she is a masterful entertainer, however, no amount of foundation or mascara can conceal the omnipresent rasp and grit in her voice that continually belie Bilan’s hard-lived life.
The Madame’s Art || The Madame as Artwork
In many of the publicity materials I have seen, director Qiu Jiongjiong still identifies first as an artist, in some cases not even mentioning that he has slowly built up an impressive catalogue of films over the last 10+ years. If we think of Madame as not only a film, but also as an artwork, what do we see?
First, we see Qiu’s interest in the operatic. Bilan and Fan are both divas in every sense of the word: performative, electrifying, difficult figures that live life on a grand scale. But the operatic also shows up in a surprising form in the fifth scene the documentary, when Fan launches into a traditional tune. The tune, which some desultory Googling suggests is most associated with the northern Chinese musical storytelling genre of Jingyun Dagu 京韻大鼓,2 takes both Fan and Bilan out of the smoky world of 1920s Weimar/Parisian/Shanghainese cabarets, and instead grounds them in the social context of northeastern China. It simultaneously suggests Fan’s social history and a context for Bilan’s unique mode of storytelling and music-making.
The traditional tune also provides a way to organize the multiple tragedies that coexist in the complicated subject of the documentary’s eponymous Madame: the tragedy of Fan’s family history, the tragedy aestheticized through Bilan’s songful performances, and the ongoing (and arguably worsening) tragedy of queerness in contemporary China. Opera’s larger-than-life tragedies, long the object of aesthetic contemplation for adoring fans, become incarnate in Bilan’s drag performances and Fan’s extended commentaries.3
If Bilan’s life is an extended performance, Qiu’s documentary creates from Bilan’s work of life-as-art a new work of filmic art. The stark camera work, the strong aesthetic sense that permeates every shot in film create a patina of romance around the Madame. And though Fan is very open about their own tragedies and challenges, the documentary at times glamorizes them (though perhaps inadvertently).
Similarly, the lack of any commentary other than Fan’s own allows the film’s audiences to linger in the spectacularity and virtuosity of Bilan’s DIY performances. Fan throws open the window on a world that is unfamiliar to many of the bourgeois viewers on international festival circuits, and tragedy becomes the ornament that simultaneously adds to and softens the frisson that accompanies the act of voyeurism facilitated by Qiu’s film.
The Madame Has Left the Building
Though it may not force us to confront some of the grimmer realities of Fan’s life, Madame still provides ample material to consider the the ongoing precarity of queer life in much of the world today, and the tragedy that this precarity routinely produces.
In many ways, the China of 2010 (when this film was released) was a very different place than the China of today. In 1997, homosexuality was delisted as a criminal offense in China. In 2001, it was removed from a national list of mental disorders, a move that coincided with the first Beijing Queer Film Festival. In 2009, Shanghai held its first gay pride festival. In short, in 2010 there was reason to hope that China’s liberalizing path would lead to greater rights and protections for LGBTQ+ citizens.
This moment of hope did not save Bilan, however, who took her own life in late 2010, just months after the release of Qiu Jiongjiong’s document of her life and work.4 Furthermore, China continues to regress on the issue of gay rights. The Chinese government today continues to implement school programs designed to produce “manly” men; “sissies” have been banned from stages, television screens, and film; Shanghai Pride was shut down in 2020; popular gay dramas on the streaming platform iQiyi have been unceremoniously scrubbed from the Chinese web, and rumors abound that the show’s actors have been banned from future appearances together. Meanwhile, government darlings like action film star Wu Jing 吴京 proudly bill themselves as a corrective to the feminization of Chinese manhood; a superior court recently upheld a lower court ruling saying that a widely used university textbook was right to refer to homosexuality as a mental disorder; and just in the last few weeks, two students at Tsinghua University (the “MIT of China”) were disciplined for distributing rainbow flags on campus (the same campus where Fan was once a visiting professor—a significant mark of professional success that goes unacknowledged in the documentary.)5
These kinds of laws, programs, and campaigns have real-world consequences, whether in China or elsewhere. Counter-campaigns like Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” can only do so much. In the United States, queer communities currently live in fear that hard-won legal rights will soon be taken away by a reactionary, bigoted court that hides theocratic jurisprudence behind the paper tiger of originalism (except for when it comes to, I don’t know, things like interracial marriage, the legal personhood of Black Americans, or the right of women to be Supreme Court Justices, all of which topics clearly pose no conflict of interest for any of the current justices).
This is a film that is worthy of being watched, discussed, and watched again. It is also a film that almost certainly could not be made or screened in China today. If you do see it, please try to keep in mind some of the broad strokes of our current social realities as you listen to Bilan’s story, especially if this queer world is unfamiliar to you. Mundane iterations of Bilan’s story remain all too common, and will only become more common as reactionary campaigns work to redefine “life, liberty, and happiness” as strictly delimited, heteronormative lifeways. Bilan de Linphel/Fan Qihui’s generous, gregarious storytelling offers a rare chance to see the campy beauty, the joy, the tragedy, and the desperate loneliness that all too often attend queer life, and Bilan’s struggles remain both poignant and urgent today.
In English publicity materials for the film, Bilan de Linphel is referred to as “transsexual,” (a term that does not appear in the Chinese synopsis of the film.) In Chinese, materials referring to Bilan’s off-stage persona use the gender-neutral/masculine personal pronoun tā他, while their on-stage persona is referred to in the feminine tā 她 (these two words are exact homophones in Chinese, and the only difference is in writing). Based on Bilan’s own commentary however, it appears that Fan’s self-conceived gender identity was much more ambivalent than the rather cut-and-dried term “transsexual” might suggest. As such, when using personal pronouns, I have opted to use gender neutral pronouns to refer to Fan, and feminine pronouns for the stage persona Bilan de Linphel.
I did not research this thoroughly. If anyone knows anything to the contrary, please just let me know (nicely).
In some ways, this offers a variation on Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar’s argument that, in Chinese film, the “operatic mode” is in fact the realistic mode, that is to say, Chinese (martial arts) films are often at their most realistic when they grow out of the aesthetic paradigms of traditional Chinese opera (see “Operatic Modes: Opera Film, Martial Arts, and Cultural Nationalism,” in China on Screen: Cinema and Nationalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2006]). Here, Bilan and Fan give an example of how the operatic can become not only realistic, but a real, lived experience.
https://www.easyatm.com.tw/wiki/樊其輝. Troublingly, this detail is almost never shared in publicity materials about the film. I only learned of Fan’s/Bilan’s death when reading for this post.
See “他是中国著名设计师、一个妓女、清华大学客座教授、变装皇后原文網址” https://kknews.cc/zh-sg/history/qeqgmm8.html (15 Nov. 2016, accessed 1 Aug. 2020).