Diplomat's Deception page

This true story of cross-dressing was brought to the screen after tremendous success as a stage play. David Cronenberg directed author David Henry Hwang’s film adaptation of an intrigue pairing an infatuated French vice-consul with a gender-bending diva from the Beijing Opera.

Jeremy Irons seems somewhat miscast as Gallimard, whose first night at the opera sends him into a tailspin over the soft-voiced, excessively modest Liling (John Lone). Irons comes across as very British; he conveys passion exclusively through his burning gaze and compressed mouth, without any of the charm or sensuality a French diplomat would have (having lived for 18 years in Paris, I know).

Lone is far more believable in his many-layered performance as the duplicitous lover. Taking advantage of the Frenchman’s preference for fantasy over reality, the actress, giving Gallimard the Butterfly of his dreams while giving him head, is really a spy for the Chinese government.

Homosexual love matters in this film, though the diplomat’s bisexuality, admitted in life and in the play, is denied to the bitter end of the screenplay. There’s just enough shadow beneath Liling’s makeup for an attentive viewer to see what’s going on. Besides, everyone in the diplomatic corps except Gallimard seems to know that in the Beijing Opera, female roles are traditionally played by men. This gives their scenes together a perceptibly different erotic twist.

The confrontation scene toward the end shakes you up as it reveals, not the lover’s sex but his true feelings for the obsessed vice-consul. What Gallimard wants, deep down, is not a woman but a stereotype that is colonialist and racist as well as sexist. This, for Butterfly, is the real tragedy.

The story is played out against the backdrop of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in the late 1960s. Hwang makes effective use of recent history to comment tartly on the blindness of ideology and the terrible mistakes of just about everyone’s government. “I’m inexperienced but not ignorant,” Liling tells Gallimard as “she” unbuttons his shirt. You don’t have to join the CIA, or even remember what happened in France, China and Vietnam, to figure out who’s ignorant in spite of his experience. For an even more fascinating take on this story, read Joyce Wadler’s Liaison (Bantam); the reality, it turns out, was even wilder than the movie.