I was attending my first New York Film Festival in 1990 when the Chinese Cinema Revolution reached America’s shores.

The film was Zhang Yimou and Yang Fengliang’s overwrought, elegaic and allegorial “Ju Dou,” and it gave much of the world its first taste of the great Chinese filmmakers about to break out of the confines of the People’s Republic, the force of film nature that was actress Gong Li and the glories of Chinese color cinematography.

“Chinese Technicolor” was the whisper around Alice Tully Hall. Hollywood and European movies just didn’t look like this. Not any more.

Titles like “Life on a String,” Raise the Red Lantern,” “To Live,” “The Story of Qiu Ji” and other “Fifth Generation” Chinese cinema poured out, a red tide of gorgeously-shot films that sometimes battled past censors, sometimes made their points obliquely and metaphorically, and bowled over the movie world.

The masterpiece among those masterpieces has to be “Farewell My Concubine,” a true epic, a Chinese “Doctor Zhivago” that takes a Chinese opera relationship between “stage brothers” from the 1920s and an “Oliver Twist” youth with beatings and a suicide in opera school, through the Sino-Japanese War (WWII), the Communist takeover, the denunciations of the Cultural Revolution all the way to 1990.

And its central relationship is notable for being an (apparently unrequited) same sex love story, two stars of China’s stylized all-male opera, mentoring and supporting each other, feuding in jealousy when one gets married, struggling to save each other from the Japanese, the Nationalist government, the Communists and each other over the decades.

Chen Kaige’s film was banned in China for its homosexuality, suicide and perhaps for the unflattering depiction of the uglier aspects of Chinese Communist history, and that only made it more tempting to Western audiences.

For its 30th anniversary, “Farewell My Concubine” has been restored for re-release by Film Movement. Well done. This is a movie lover’s bucket-list film, so you have your orders.

Two aged stars are seen in silhouette, rehearsing in in the fictive present. They’ve been apart for decades, they tell a facilities manager. A lot of things kept them apart.

It was “the Gang of Four’s” doing, one jokes. “Isn’t everything,” the other cracks?

Decades before, a child was given up by his prostitute mother to the almost Medieval — in more ways than one — Peking Opera. He is rejected for his bent back and having an extra finger on one hand. His mother gets him off her hands by lopping off that extra finger. The opera’s Dickensian leadership straps little Douzi to a rack to straighten his back. But the canings doled-out to one and all as their “training” could kill the slight shild.

The rebellious Shitou sticks up for him, turns back the bullies and even takes a caning of two on the frail child’s behalf. They bond for life.

The film is a nearly three hour saga of their relationship as it spins around their most famous roles, as the concubine and the king in a popular Chinese opera. Life onstage mimics life offstage, with the feminine and demure Douzi, aka Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung) pitching his voice in its highest register and his bluff, breaks-bricks-with-his-forehead co-star and protector Shitou, using his given name Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) as an adult, playing the masculine, belicose but romantic king onstage and off.

They study, face years of corporal punishment and are discovered by an impressario, a moment of triumph with a brutal bloody edge. Dieyi is pursued by a rich “patron” (You Ge) with a thing for opera and the most feminine opera star of them all. And Xiaolou carries on with a local prostitute (Gong Li) until she is pursued by a few too many suitors and he rashly tells this “damsel in distress” and her cruder customers that they’re engaged.

Dieyi doesn’t take this well. Their testy menage a trois is pulled this way and that by the fortunes of World War II, Japanese threats followed by denunciations by Nationalists topped by dogmatic and judgmental Communists who kick out the Nationalists.

Gong Li’s turn as Xuxian shows vulnerability, insecurity and on a couple of occasions when the chips are down, a steely resolve and eye for leverage against this new “official” threat or that one. We never question her love for her savior, or her grudging acceptance of his connection with his co-star.

The “stage brothers” act and fight and struggle to get along and face one moment of truth after another as they surf the currents of turbulent 20th century Chinese history. And every so often, a tableaux of that history intrudes on their insular world.

They live their whole lives by the ethos of their cruel taskmaster of a teacher (Qi Lü).

“If you belong to the human race,” he barks (in Mandarin with English subtitles), “you go to the opera.” It is what marks someone’s “civilized” “humanity.”

The scope of the script, based on a Lillian Lee novel (she co-adapted it) became a template for Chinese “Fifth Generation” cinema, a way of relating modern Chinese history and rationalising the excesses of this leader or that era through a personal story.

The peformances are startling in the stylized gestures and almost musical sing-song of the stage work and the unspoken bond and love, jealousies battling loyalties, offstage. The echoes of their childhood “training” and trauma spill over onto a baby that take into the company as children, whom they later try to train the same way as an adult (Lei Han) — lots of canings and worse.

But it is the colors, the life contained in those vivid those tableux, the theaters, street scenes of this or that army marching by, the shadows and fog of “reality” intruding on the rigidly constrained theatrical performances that stick in the memory from this masterpiece.

“Farewell My Concubine” captures a moment in cinematic time when artistic freedom of expression first publicly chafed at the restraints of a totalitarian state. Here was a government that was no longer in sync with the vibrant, long repressed culture all but exploding off the screen thanks to a generation of artists ready to show the world masterpieces, even if their leaders weren’t sure they should allow them to.

Rating: R, violence, sex, profanity

Cast:Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, You Ge, Ying Da, Lü Qi, Lei Han and Gong Li.

Credits: Directed by Chen Kaige, scripted by Lillian Lee and Lue Wei, based on Lee’s novel. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 2:51