Entranced by his first sight of Song Liling, during a performance at a diplomatic function, he falls immediately in love, forgets his wife and his responsibilities, and embarks on a mad passion that leads to scenes in which Song, remaining fully clothed, leads Gallimard into an erotic deception the movie wisely leaves to our imagination. (Old proverb: Be careful what you ask for because you may get it.) The movie is set mostly in Peking, in a world that the visiting diplomat finds even more exotic and mysterious than perhaps he should. The answer he receives, of course, is "yes." Song is his butterfly, all right he is simply not anything else Gallimard thinks he is. "Are you my Butterfly?" he asks at a moment of great pain, and his agony prevents us from smiling. Irons bases his performance on the understanding that erotic impulses are always completely humorless to those who hold them, even though they might seem hilarious to the observer. (Another movie opening this fall, " Farewell My Concubine," features a Peking opera star who is quite convincing as a woman.) Gallimard is played by Jeremy Irons, the screen's poet of tortured sexuality, and no one else could have done a better job of suggesting the inverted obsession that leads him to fixate on a "woman" who keeps him always at arm's length. There is even dialogue in which Song Liling observes that in Peking Opera, all women are traditionally played by men. Butterfly" keeps the secret, not from the audience, but only from Gallimard. Unlike " The Crying Game," which created a successful deception, "M. John Lone, as Song Liling, the transvestite opera star, does not make a convincing female, and is perhaps not intended to. In the screen version, it is impossible to create the illusion. On the stage, the audience could be blind, as well. His self-deception sets the stage for the play's drama, in which the Asian butterfly is victorious, for once, over the visiting European. He so desperately required this person to be the butterfly of his dreams that he was simply blind to all other evidence. This explanation sounds like romantic idealism, but Hwang suggests, more darkly, that Gallimard also was blinded by his white Western fantasies about a submissive Asian woman.
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