David Cronenberg
M. Butterfly

Would you continue to love someone you then discover to be completely different from the person you knew and fell in love with?

"M. Butterfly" is a film that deviates from Cronenberg's classic standards, indulging in a reflection on love and its sometimes tragic consequences. An intense and visceral love that emerges from the deepest and most hidden parts of the human soul, transcending passion and sexuality, aspects that in the Canadian director's work are almost marginal and, in any case, relegated to the background.

The backdrop is pre-revolutionary China with its millennia-old traditions and its rigid, ancient customs that reject any western cultural opening. The Western man is considered the "white devil," the one who, in Puccini's work, marries a geisha only to repudiate her after a month, leaving her alone with their child to pine away in pain awaiting his return.

Here René (played by a sumptuous Jeremy Irons in another great Cronenbergian performance following "Dead Ringers"), a French diplomat, falls in love with a local soprano who sings Puccini's arias with the grace and elegance of a butterfly. René is swept away by this feeling, defenseless. For the love of Butterfly, he will set aside his life and being to follow her in her modesty and customs so distant from European ones, respecting her timing and waiting for her with hope and dedication, heedless of the obstacles such diversity presents.

From "white devil," slowly and inexorably he himself will become the madame Butterfly of Puccini's memory. But will his feelings hold up when he discovers that his beloved butterfly is actually a man serving the red guards, recruited to extract information from him about the Vietnam War to use against the Western system he belongs to? Will he continue to love the person who was hiding behind madame Butterfly?

"I loved the illusion of a woman created by a man," René will say to the Chinese spy who duped him during all those years spent thinking and hoping he had found the woman of his life, in what will reveal itself to be a "Madame Butterfly" in reverse where, for once, the role of the ruthless and cruel Lt. Pinkerton will be played by what was originally the geisha.

Geisha who, just as in Puccini's opera, in the certainty of not being able to give love anymore, will find the justification for her life only in the ultimate sacrifice.