Farewell My Concubine
Where the DNA of Farewell My Concubine travels
Films it shaped
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Barry Jenkins has cited Claire Denis's Beau Travail as a foundational influence, the film that showed him how to use the body, light, and music as primary storytelling tools rather than dialogue. Moonlight's fragmented structure, its use of color as emotion, its willingness to let silence carry meaning, these are lessons from Denis and Wong Kar-wai. Beau Travail is streaming on Criterion Channel and is one of the most beautiful films ever made.
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Luca Guadagnino has cited Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, a 1968 Italian film in which a mysterious stranger arrives and seduces every member of a bourgeois family, as the direct narrative model for what happens between Elio and Oliver that summer. Wong Kar-wai's influence is everywhere in the texture: desire as something felt in light and fabric before it's understood as feeling. Teorema is on MUBI and will change how you read the film.