Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 13:01:00 EDT From: Song Weaver Subject: 'Concubine' gets cold reception in China BEIJING (UPI) -- As expected, Chinese director Chen Kaige Saturday took home this year's Golden Globe award for best foreign language film of 1993, the first time any Chinese-language movie had won the prestigious award. But Chen and "Farewell to my Concubine" have also received some unexpected criticism from government adversaries in Beijing. The latest issue of the Communist Party's official magazine Seeking Truth blasted Chen's 1993 epic for advocating homosexuality and praising the ruling Communists' enemies. "The film openly advocates homosexuality -- it is known to all that even in the West homosexuality is the same social pollution as drug- taking, prostitution and gambling," the article railed. The sharply-worded attack, which calls homosexuality "a reflection of the social and spritual crisis of the capitalist system," came just before Concubine's second major success in less than a year -- the film also shared top honors at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. Despite the worldwide critical acclaim for the movie, which chronicles two Peking Opera actors' relationship through China's last four regimes, Chinese censors were not impressed. The movie was banned last summer after winning Cannes' Golden Palm award. But officials later bowed to popular pressure and international ridicule, allowing the film to win accolades from its Chinese audiences. Now the mouthpiece of the Communist Party has regurgitated the arguments from last summer. The Party criticizes the film for its positive interpretations of the World War II Japanese occupation forces, their Nationalist enemies and the feudal ways of the last emperor. "Apart from homosexuality, the film also sings the praises of the past ruling classes, from the Qing dynasty and warlords to the Japanese aggressors and the Nationalists, all of whom paid attention to Peking Opera," it said. "Today we are building the socialist ethics, can we parade and sell spiritual garbage to general audiences and the broad masses?" it said. But the dogmatic diatribe comes as the government releases alarming numbers for its beleaguered film industry and admits that its obsolete management and ideology are behind the recession. More than 6,000 cinemas shut their doors last year due to a 10 percent decline in box office receipts as audiences elected to stay home and watch videos, the Workers' Daily reported Sunday. "The film industry recession is attributed to the slow pace of industry reform -- Chinese film administered itself through bureaucratic methods, not ewconomic ones, resulting in overstaffing and low efficiency," the article said. Admitting the government has only just concluded that "film is both art and commodity," the article also blamed mediocre film production and a lack of quality scripts for the decline, saying playrights earned the same amount in 1993 as they did 30 years ago.