When I began watching the movie based on this play, I had forgotten the fact that in Chinese opera, men traditionally play all the women's roles. As a result, I was duped, along with Gallimard, into never doubting the biological sex of Song -- up until the great revelation, of course. So for me, the first three-fourths or more of the movie seemed but a slightly more interesting than usual variation on one of the standard heterosexual romantic plots. Thus: Strong man meets strong woman and loses his strength (so to speak) in immediate -- and rather superficialy based, in my opinion -- passion for her. He pursues her stubbornly. Strong woman yields to his charms and loses her strength in eventual love for him. Strong woman becomes meek and submissive towards him. Man becomes strong again (so to speak) taking on heavy dominant role in the relationship, to the point where the viewer is almost cringing at his periodically overbearing manner. The two elements of particular interest during this first 3/4+ of the movie were the excruciatingly carefully done cinematography and the introduction of the fact that Song was using Gallimard as a source of information. Discovering her role as a spy led me to finally take serious interest in the movie, as I mentally debated whether or not her capacity for calculated manipulation of his psychology and expectations meant that none of her apparent feelings for him were genuine at all.
It was, however, the revelation of Song's biological sex which finally brought me to the edge of my seat and led me to acute emotional involvement in the play. Because I have a strong personal interest in the issue of gender roles, homosexuality, and transgendered issues, I was immediately in a fair bit of sympathy with Song, as his/her (or shall I say, as does Raphael Carter, a favorite author of mine, "zir") character in the movie seemed at the point of the revelation to be quite truly in love with Gallimard. I can quite understand Gallimard's inability to immediately accept the sudden discovery of the biological sex of his lover; after all, this man had been accustomed to one way of thinking about zir for quite some years, and the further fact that these years had been a fantasy well-tailored to his psyche contributed to make its shattering especially traumatic. Nevertheless, I found his rather brutal rejection of Song, in the gripping prison-van scene to be quite angering. What especially struck me at the moment was the tremendous amount of mental and emotional pain and anguish could have been averted had Gallimard been able to accept gender as a fluid entity; a social construct. But his rigidity at the time is understandable, for the reasons I previously noted as well as because of the stubbornly irrational inflexibility with which society then, as now, regarded and still regards issues of sex and gender identity.
During the class discussion of the movie and the play, I was rather surprised to hear people asserting that Gallimard and Song were homosexual lovers. While this could be regarded as true in a very strictly physical aspect, the emotional, mental, and psychological aspects of homosexuality are so at odds with the Gallimard/Song relationship that it is almost ridiculous. For two people to have a genuinely homosexual relationship, it seems to me that they must necessarily be aware of each other's sex, because to gay men and lesbians, as well as to heterosexuals in fact, the sex of one's partner, whichever it may be, is something to be appreciated and valued. Of course, this begs the question of what to call, let us say, a relationship between a biological male and a female-to-male transgendered person (assuming this to be a fairly straightforward transgendered relationship where both partners are certain of their respective sexual identities as being either male or female). My personal tendency would be to classify this as being homosexual despite the original biological sex of the latter, because since he identified as a male, for all practical purposes it is appropriate to consider him as such. But in the Gallimard/Song relationship, Gallimard was utterly oblivious, at least at a conscious level, of Song's biological sex, and at all times during their relationship, regarded zir as a female in every respect. Hence their relationship ought to be regarded as being either heterosexual or perhaps some murky variety of transgendered relationship, along with relationships where one or both partner's sexual identity is fluid, as Song's was, or does not fall into a dipolar male/female orientation. This concept of a fluid sexual identity was also quite interesting. I found it fascinating how the way Song seemed to take on a male or female role depending entirely on context paralleled the Chinese social philosophy of how women ought to be defined by the wills and expectations of men.
The problem of how Gallimard was able to have a physical relationship with Song for a period of some years without realizing the latter was biologically male -- and even believe he'd fathered a child with zir -- was interesting, and I found myself pondering it a bit. But basically, I accepted it as a relatively minor leap-of-faith sort of issue, which shouldn't have been allowed to distract from the strengths of the drama.
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