into a woman so completely that he carries on an affair with her for years without knowing she isn't a woman.

Within Song's presentation of herself to Gallimard and the outside world, there are several layers, so to speak, of her use of clothing to manipulate her own persona. In his dreamlike recall of events and the flashbacks shown to us, Gallimard sees Song in the actual role of Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly) in Puccini's opera. Here she's dressed in Japanese clothes, while Marc and Gallimard are play-acting the roles of Sharpless, the American consul, and Pinkerton, the naval officer who marries and abandons Butterfly. Sharpless wears a cap that designates his official status. The apparent conflation of different Asian cultures is emblematic of the stereotyping the European mind reflexively engages in, and Song's explanation to Gallimard of the atrocities committed by Japan against China is significant in this context.

But clothing also controls the identities of the Westerners in the story. The evening clothes Gallimard wears at a party during his time as a diplomat reinforce the whole concept of role-playing that underlies the play. Gallimard is thus already play-acting even before his involvement with Song makes this necessary or takes it to a new level of deceptiveness.

Song has multiple identities: as a man, a woman, a spy, an actress in the Chinese theater (where she wears the costumes of Chinese opera, rather than the Japanese outfits required by the Western-imagined Japan of Puccini's opera), and the lover of Gallimard. When Gallimard at last is taken into custody by the authorities, he's deeply in shock over the ruse Song has perpetrated. In the film version, Song takes off all his clothes, finally, as if eliminating them is a way of showing Gallimard that he is still the same person he was when Gallimard loved him. It is an almost unbearably harsh moment in which the pretenses based on dress have fallen away to reveal an even more tragic core of the story than we could have imagined.