The pathos of this heart-rending story about a sweet-natured Japanese girl and the caddish American naval lieutenant who marries then deserts her has seldom been conveyed with such emotional directness. In his sumptuous filming of Puccini's opera, director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle uses an array of cinematic effects to evoke the protagonists' irreconcilably separate lives and worlds. As Butterfly, Mirella Freni is unbearably moving in one of the finest...

During the Cultural Revolution in China in the mid-1960s, a French diplomat falls in love with a singer in the Beijing Opera, not knowing that the object of his affection is a man. Interwoven with allusions to the Puccini opera "Madama Butterfly", a story of love and betrayal unfolds.--Adapted from imdb.com.