1994

'M.Butterfly' is unconvincing poor casting

M. Butterfly 

Stars: Jeremy Irons, John Lone

Director: David Cronenberg

MPAA rating: R

Critic's rating: **

While it's beautifully staged, and photographed with an almost calligraphic precision, David Cronenberg's adaptation of M. Butterfly falls curiously flat, hobbled by a casting mistake that renders the film emotionally chilly and a screenplay that is logically problematic.

Adapted from David Henry Hwang's screenplay by the playwright himself, the film is based on the true story of a French diplomat who fell in love in China with a male Beijing Opera singer whom he mistook for a woman. Through their 18-year-relationship (shortened to less than four years for the film), he is unwittingly passing state secrets to the Communists through his lover,  who steers clear of the Cultural Revolution with valued information for Chinese intelligence.

The film's central problem, perhaps, is that it should never have been a film. The distance so crucial to suspending disbelief in a theater setting is lost in the filmed version, and is further undermined by the casting. Jeremy Irons is never convincing as the French attache Rene Gallimard (he's too muscularly British), but that's peripheral. The real problem is that we're not convinced that he is convinced that the singer Song Liling (John Lone) is a woman.

It can be argued that Cronenberg cast the film with this in mind, to let the audience in on a secret that he knew the intimacy of film couldn't keep hidden for long.  But anyone who's seen the terrific performance by Leslie Cheung in the Cannes-winning Farewell, My Concubine knows that it can be done much more realistically than it is here.

We can't empathize with Irons' Rene unless we believe he could truly fall for this woman. And the questions that the piece should leave the viewer with - when did he guess? how could he not know? how deep was his complicity in passing the state secrets? - become moot if the disguise is obvious from the start.

Lone is a strong actor being put in a virtually impossible situation. He has tried to modulate his voice, half-talking and half-whispering to simulate the husky mystery of a woman's voice. But it never quite connects;he never seems more comfortable than at the end of the film when he's dressed in a man's clothes. (By comparison, Cheung was just the opposite in Farewell, fully inhabiting the character that he was playing and the character that character was playing.)

The rest of the supporting roles are largely perfunctory; Barbara Sukowa fairly disappears as Irons' wife and Annabel Leventon seems needlessly misanthropic in a throwaway role as one of Rene's cursory affairs. Ian Richardson, however, does have a nicely dry turn as the laconic French ambassador.

Cronenberg's best films have succeeded because of their visceral punch. The absurdity of human mutation was made all too real in The Fly; the chilling realization of the most private betrayals brought home in Dead Ringers. But M. Butterfly's ultimate flaw is that the whole picture seems to take place on a theoretical level. One can respect this film, admire it even; but it's hard to become involved in it. 

Austin American-Statesman (US)