‘M. Butterfly’ Facing Glare of the Spotlight : Movies: The story was a hit on stage, but it’s finding that life on the big screen is a whole different ballgame. Most critics have not been kind to its transition.

“M. Butterfly” was a big success on the stage. It won three Tony Awards (including best play) and was performed in more than 30 countries. But as a movie, the story of a French diplomat’s long-term delusion about the sex of his Chinese opera-star lover and partner in espionage has turned out to be more problematic.

The film, starring Jeremy Irons as the diplomat and John Lone as the singer, has so far been panned more often than it has been praised, with most critics complaining that the play, inspired by actual events that unfolded over two decades, was botched in transition to the screen. Now in limited release, the film will be playing in 150 theaters this weekend. .

The film grossed an estimated $263,000 this past weekend in 55 theaters.

Figuring out how to transform a play into a movie is almost always a difficult process, but “M. Butterfly” posed an unusual dilemma for director David Cronenberg (“The Fly”) and David Henry Hwang, who wrote both the stage and screen versions. They needed to make a seemingly incredible relationship work in close-up, and most critics did not buy it.

Cronenberg believes the critics brought so much baggage with them into the screening room that they failed to understand why Lone is not supposed to be 100% convincing as a female. He noted that his picture has inevitably been compared, almost always unfavorably, to both “The Crying Game,” the hit British film that also turns on sexual identity, and to the Chinese epic “Farewell My Concubine,” which--coincidentally enough--is also about a transvestite Beijing Opera star.

“Concubine,” which opens here Oct. 22, has been a favorite on the festival circuit and was co-winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

“(The critics) bring another movie with them in their attache case and seem to unspool that one and they don’t see mine at all,” the director said in a telephone interview.

Since the play was first produced in 1988, another new wrinkle has been added to further complicate perceptions of “M. Butterfly.” Just published this month is “Liaison,” a book by New York journalist Joyce Wadler, which tells French foreign service official Bernard Boursicot’s version of his affair with Shi Pei Pu--a story in many ways stranger than either the movie or the play. According to the book, for example, Shi, in reality a librettist, appeared to be a man when he and Boursicot met in 1964. It was not until a year later that Shi claimed that he was actually a woman who had been forced by his family to dress as a man.

As a play, “M. Butterfly” abounded in theatrical effects, which diverted attention from the plausibility of the story. Instead, the focus was on such universal issues as the struggles between men and women and the condescension of West toward East.

But close-ups do not permit such distractions and several reviews said the shadow on Lone’s upper lip makes it hard to accept the idea that the diplomat, known in “Butterfly” as Rene Gallimard (Irons), could believe that his lover, called Song Liling, has borne him a child.

After auditioning a man who was “totally convincing as a woman,” Cronenberg realized he was not looking for a Jaye Davidson--the actor to whom Lone has been unfavorably compared in some of the reviews. Variety’s Todd McCarthy, for example, said the scene in “The Crying Game” in which the hairdresser played by Davidson “reveals the truth about his body” is “far more powerful in the earlier film.”

But Cronenberg said he was not aiming for a “Crying Game”-type surprise. Instead, he said, his movie revolves around a character living in an exotic culture who has stereotyped notions about the Chinese. After hearing Song sing the lead role of Cio-Cio San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,’ Gallimard allows himself to be deluded into thinking he has found his ideal woman.

“What I was trying to do was to make John convincing to the audience in the sense that Jeremy could convince himself,” the director said. “For various reasons, he wants to be deceived. . . . It’s a willed act of creativity on the part of both men that they shall create this opera of their own lives in which they are playing these wonderfully melodramatic roles.”

Cronenberg said B.D. Wong, who won a Tony for playing Song on Broadway, “looked much too masculine in close-up” to get the role.

In reshaping his script into a screenplay, Hwang began by retaining more of the East-West focus that had formed such an important theme on the stage. But Cronenberg encouraged him to concentrate more on the “intimacy of the relationship itself.”

“David’s concern was to look at the ways in which a relationship can kind of become hermetically sealed and work on its own rules,” said Hwang, who was inspired to write “Butterfly” after hearing about the 1986 trial in which Boursicot and Shi were convicted of espionage. Both men have been released from prison.

What actually happened is “far more astounding even than the astounding story that we tell in the play, which people find impossible to believe in any case,” said David Geffen, whose Warner Bros.-funded company made the $18-million movie, which was filmed in China, Budapest, Paris and Toronto. Geffen was also chief backer of the play.

Unlike Gallimard, who is married when he arrives in China, Boursicot was sexually inexperienced when he met Shi and was apparently fighting his homosexual tendencies. He now lives with another man.

“I said to myself, when I learned about this, would that have been a more interesting dramatic choice?” Cronenberg recalled. “I decided not, because then it becomes a story of repressed homosexuality.”

In some ways, however, the stories are not all that different. “The whole book is about how when reality is painful, you don’t see,” said Wadler. “Bernard wanted to star in the greatest romance in the world, and Pei Pu was a librettist. Every time Bernard got a little bored, Pei Pu improved the story.”