MOVIE REVIEW : Chasing an Elusive ‘Butterfly’

Dazzling and multicolored as a play, “M. Butterfly” (AMC Century 14) has unaccountably been turned into a drab moth of a film. Despite starring Jeremy Irons and being directed by David Cronenberg, whose entire output from “Scanners” and “The Fly” to “Dead Ringers” and “Naked Lunch” has been an attempt to get one step beyond the ordinary, “Butterfly” is a determinedly pedestrian affair, sure to make anyone approaching the material for the first time wonder what the fuss was about.

And a great deal of fuss there certainly has been. When a French diplomat was arrested and accused of spying in 1986, the news that he had no idea that his Chinese co-conspirator and lover for 20 years, the woman he thought had borne him a son, was in fact a man, made headlines around the world and didn’t do much for France’s reputation as the home of savoir-faire.

Playwright David Henry Hwang was so taken by that tale that he used it as the basis for his drama “M. Butterfly,” a multiple Tony winner (including best play) for its Broadway production and subsequently performed in more than 30 countries.

What was good enough for all those sovereign nations, however, was regrettably deemed insufficient for Hollywood. The problem is not the presence of anything sacred in the play, but that in the process of turning it upside down and reversing its focus Cronenberg and Hwang, who also wrote the screenplay, have managed to misplace all the considerable magic the original possessed.

The key to the play’s success was its joint audacity and theatricality. It opened with the diplomat, renamed Rene Gallimard, admitting that the public revelations of his private life have made him an international laughingstock. But instead of being timid about things, Gallimard is brash and confrontational, insisting that he will persuade everyone that “in China I once loved, and was loved by, the perfect woman.”

What follows is as much an exciting philosophical meditation on the nature of love and sexuality as a blow by blow retelling of Gallimard’s relationship with Chinese opera singer Song Liling. The story is further energized by the conflict between what your eyes tell you you are seeing and what you know the truth to be.

For reasons that are more shrouded in mystery than Song Liling’s sexuality, the movie has chosen to reverse all of this, carefully taking the tension out of the story by telling it in a straightforward way. The result is a kind of Asian “Crying Game” except that everyone who cares knows the secret going in. And that wonderful line about being loved by the perfect woman doesn’t set things up, but comes as a kind of limp coda at the tepid finale.

Even the film version’s nominal advantage of being able to re-create the physical world “M. Butterfly” (rated R for sexuality and a brief bloody sequence) took place in does not add any excitement. Gallimard is introduced on site as a functionary at the French Embassy in Beijing in 1964, a low-level bureaucrat who vetts the expense accounts of more senior men.

Complacently married to Jeanne (Barbara Sukowa, wasted like everyone else), Gallimard stops off at an embassy party one night and sits transfixed as Chinese opera singer Song Liling (John Lone) runs through some arias from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.” Meeting the singer afterward, he is entranced by her tart analysis of why Westerners all love the opera. “I’ve never seen a performance as convincing as yours,” he says, which turns out to be a considerable understatement.

As presented by Cronenberg and Hwang, the relationship between these two plays out like a conventional extramarital affair. After bulling his way through Song Liling’s protestations of sexual innocence (though always allowing her to remain fully clothed), Gallimard starts to delude himself that he knows something about Eastern ways of thinking, a situation his surprising promotion at the embassy only encourages. It is all fated to end badly, and it surely does.

Cronenberg’s previous films have always luxuriated in over-the-top visuals, and here, with only words to work with, he can’t seem to get them to do his bidding. Hwang’s script, which adds little but idle chitchat to the original play, is surprisingly mundane, and reading it seems to have taken the heart out of the actors.

Jeremy Irons, who gave perhaps the performance of his career as identical twin gynecologists in Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers,” plays Gallimard in a kind of a daze. And though B.D. Wong, who won a Tony as Song Liling (and was last seen on the big screen as a scientist in “Jurassic Park”), gave the role an engaging sauciness on stage, John Lone (“Iceman,” “The Last Emperor”) has chosen to play it quite somberly, which further deadens a not very lively film.

Also hampering Lone is the fact that movies are a more realistic medium than theater, and the illusion that he is she is harder to create. Lone looks androgynous at best on the big screen, never totally feminine, which makes the filmmakers’ attempts to mask that fact seem especially silly. After sitting through “M. Butterfly,” you’ll wonder why they even bothered to try.

‘M. Butterfly’

Jeremy Irons: Rene Gallimard

John Lone: Song Liling

Barbara Sukowa: Jeanne Gallimard

Ian Richardson: Ambassador Toulon

A Geffen Pictures presentation, released by Warner Bros. Pictures. Director David Cronenberg. Producer Gabriella Martinelli. Executive producers David Henry Hwang, Philip Sandhaus. Screenplay David Henry Hwang, based on his play. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky. Editor Ronald Sanders. Costumes Denise Cronenberg. Music Howard Shore. Production design Carol Spier. Art director James McAteer. Set decorator Elinor Rose Galbraith. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (sexuality and a brief bloody sequence).