ANG LEE IS a transcendent filmmaker who has not only brought worldwide attention and wider reception to Chinese cinema, but he has also gone beyond his Chinese roots to become a postmodern and post-boundaried artist who moves as easily in Western genres as he does in Chinese. He is a postnational artist because he has crossed and blurred the boundaries not only of the Chinese diaspora (the meaning of the word diaspora is, literally, “the scattering of seeds”—a reference to the dispersed and displaced transnational communities of ethnic Chinese living outside of China and all around the globe) but of the cultures of East and West. Lee’s duality—this unresolved tension—is his trademark. His films concern themselves with everyday decisions made from a plurality of possible options and intimately connected to the (re)making of self-identity (see Giddens 1990) and his work concerns this crisis of identity in the construction of social forms. The problems of interpreting Ang Lee’s films include cultural studies of meaning, discourse, aesthetics, value, textuality, form, and narrativity. In evaluating his films, one must therefore consider the role of meanings, symbols, cultural frames, and cognitive schema in the theorizations of social process and institution; he deals with sweeping cultural and social themes such as tradition, the sacred, feminism, and cultural production.
Historically, Lee has been considered by Chinese scholars as a marginalized and even Americanized director. For that reason, he has been excluded from many major discussions on Chinese film directors, especially those that focus on the distinct styles of directors from mainland China. When his films have been discussed, they have been taken as hybridized culture, and with Westernization associated with marketing transnational China as a globalized culture, blurred for Western tastes. For example, New Chinese Cinemas (Browne et al. 1994) did not include Ang Lee, although it included Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang from Taiwan cinema. This work pointed out the difference between Taiwan New Cinema and the so-called “Fifth Generation” filmmaking in the People’s Republic created at a time contemporaneous with it.1 Despite its title, Lee also did not figure in Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, and Ethnography in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1995). Although Lee’s work does deal with sexuality and passion, Chow did not choose to include films outside the national boundary of mainland China. A 2001 volume, Tonglin Lu’s Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China, left him out entirely, even while including Taiwanese filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, with whom he is often grouped. This book takes into account, of course, differences between the political, social, and economic systems of Taiwan and mainland China, and shows how the process of modernization has challenged traditional cultural norms in both, taking different forms on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
One of the earliest articles to treat Lee’s films as part of the Chinese film tradition was Wei Ming Dariotis and Eileen Fung’s “Breaking the Soy Sauce Jar: Diaspora and Displacement in the Films of Ang Lee” (1997). In addition to discussing Lee’s early Chinese trilogy, this essay also discussed his Western film Sense and Sensibility, applying Chinese critical theory to locate that film in the construct of Lee’s “Chinese” filmmaking tradition. Another essay to bring Chinese theory to bear on Lee’s English-language work was William Leung’s article “Crouching Sensibility, Hidden Sense” (2001), which examined Sense and Sensibility’s Romanticism versus Rationalism, and contrasted this cultural dialectic with the Confucianism/Taoism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee Server’s volume, Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo (1999) was the first to take Lee’s work as representative of Taiwan cinema. Although this book contained only a short chapter on Taiwanese cinema, Lee was featured as the main director from Taiwan. In 2000, a volume produced in China entitled “Ten Chinese Film Directors” (Huayu dianying shi daoyan, Yang, ed.) included him in its discussion of ten Chinese—meaning “Chinese-language”—directors. Calling him a “Chinese-language” director is the easiest way to avoid political issues about “China” and “Taiwan”; however, this book’s title was not entirely accurate as the writers presented Lee’s English-language films as well. Finally, two studies published in 2005 (Chris Berry and Feii Lu’s Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After, and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell W. Davis’s Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island, 2005) included him in the Taiwanese filmmaking tradition. This lingering difficulty of pigeonholing Lee or fitting his work neatly into a scholarly tradition disappeared in 2006, when Lee won the Academy Award: after this event, China and Taiwan were both eager to claim him as part of their film traditions, and he is no longer overlooked in scholarly studies and edited collections (see, for example, Lim and Ward 2011; Zhang 2012; Rojas and Chow 2013; among others). In 2013, The Philosophy of Ang Lee (Arp, Barkman, and McRae, eds.) did not try to categorize him either way, instead opting to analyze his films through Eastern philosophy (Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist thought) in the first half of the book, and Western philosophy in the latter half, maintaining that Lee’s thought is a product of both Chinese and Western influences.
Characteristics of the Cinema of Ang Lee
Globalization and cultural identity. While Lee’s three earliest works—Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman—are particularly clear examples of the effects of globalization on cultural identity, his later films such as The Ice Storm also deal with hybridized identity—or loss of identity—in the face of postmodern global and cultural forms. Lee’s films complement the current theoretical orientation of comparative literary and film studies and their focus on the issues of cultural identity and the changes wrought by globalization. This conception of globalization is not only realized as the synthesis and transcendence of opposites but also as the representation of geographic localities and notions of territory—including nationalism, identity, narrative, and ethnicity. The implications of globalization must be considered in light of the relationship between commodity and economic exchange and symbolic and cultural exchange—globalization studies are a continued rethinking of the relation among nations, economies, cultures, social practices, etc. Malcolm Waters (1995) views globalization as fueled by symbolic exchanges, i.e., television, advertising, films, novels, music, fast food—cultural entities that are circulated and recycled simultaneously in many locations throughout the world. The implications of this theoretical paradigm are striking and provide fertile ground for the study of Lee’s films, which largely focus on modern or postmodern cultural exchanges, influences, and relationships.
Lee’s early trilogy films, Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman, deal with matters of diasporic identity, introducing issues related to the Chinese diaspora and how they experience networks of communication, commerce, travel, and kinship that connect them. James Clifford theorizes that diasporic identities are formed through hybridization caused by conflict with and intermixture with other cultures, so that “diasporic subjects are distinct versions of modern, transnational, intercultural experiences.” He continues: “The centering of diasporas around an axis of origin and return overrides the specific local interactions (identifications and ruptures, both constructive and defensive) necessary for the maintenance of diasporic social forms. The empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes solidarity and connection there. But there is not necessarily a single place or an exclusivist nation.”2 Thus the Cliffordian model highlights the fluidity of the diasporic identity, both in its formation and in its origin. Lee deals with the changing nature of the Chinese diaspora as well as the conflicting and hybridizing elements between the cultures of China/Taiwan and the United States.
The effect of globalization: An American fast-food corporation is contrasted with traditional Chinese cooking in Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).
Homosexuality. Ang Lee was the first Taiwanese director, with The Wedding Banquet (1993), to deal seriously and sympathetically with the topic of homosexuality. Reasons for this will be explored further, but an easy comparison is the feeling of rootlessness that is reflected in the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s gay road movie, Happy Together (Chunguang zhaxie, 1997). Hong Kong’s position as a city straddling East and West, with its mixed Chinese and British heritage, contributed to its troubled identity. This identity crisis was made more intense in 1984 when the Sino-British Joint Declaration announced the return of Hong Kong to China, causing worry over the disappearance of Hong Kong’s former lifestyle after the 1997 handover. In much the same way, Lee’s Taiwan is a nation in transition with an identity crisis of its own. Wong Kar-wai also made Ashes of Time (Dongxie xidu, 1994), a wuxia (martial chivalry) narrative, and his films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love (Huayang nianhua, 2000) have established him as one of the most honored Hong Kong film directors in the arena of world cinema. Wong acknowledged that having his characters escape reality in Argentina (in Happy Together) helped emphasize the theme of exile. Stephen Teo observes, “In making his two main characters gay and cutting them adrift in a faraway country, Wong was making a point about the socio-political ramifications of 1997, the fact that the one group in Hong Kong that felt the most anxious and had the most to lose in terms of individual and civil liberties was the gay community.”3 While Ang Lee’s take on homosexuality has no political overtones, it seems highly plausible that the homosexual theme in both films comes from the sense of rootlessness and lack of identity brought on by the unique political situations in both Hong Kong and Taiwan. Homosexuality is thus a common trope for shifting identity, lack of security, the purposelessness of an unknown future—the lack of direction, alienation, anonymity, and decadence caused by lack of identity associated with postmodern Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Patriarchy. It has been argued that Lee’s films reconstruct the traditional patriarchal order. Initially his early trilogy films seem to challenge traditional values, and threaten to render the traditional patriarchy obsolete, presenting the father figure in a position of weakness with slightly comic overtones—i.e., the displaced father facing the derision of his American daughter-in-law in Pushing Hands, or the visiting father “deceived” by his gay son in The Wedding Banquet. At the same time, the men and women of the younger generation are initially characterized as contemporary and “relevant” in their ability to negotiate the (post)modern world with its Western values, roles, expectations, and institutions. However, by the end of each of the early trilogy films, the father figure redeems himself, winning the sympathy, reverence, and respect that were traditionally accorded him, and reestablishes the conservative patriarchal order. This is especially remarkable in The Wedding Banquet, in which the patriarchy is redeemed in the face of gay and women’s liberation—the father indeed receives his wish to have a grandchild to carry on the family line. Thus, tensions between patriarchal authority and postmodern globalized society are renegotiated to the benefit of tradition, in such a way as to redeem and honor the father figure. Lee’s films ultimately manage to reinstate the patriarchy in a hybridized postmodern economy and culture. In Sense and Sensibility, the displacement of the father figure happens in the opening moments of the film, when he is removed from the family by death—what follows is a need to reestablish the patriarchal order so as to recover the dislocated familial and societal harmony. In The Ice Storm, the final moments of the film show the remorse of the father for abdicating his position of patriarchal responsibility. In this way it can be seen that reestablishment and reinforcement of the patriarchy are repeated themes not only in Ang Lee’s Chinese films but in his English-language films as well.
Feminism. While it may seem to contradict Lee’s respect for the father figure, feminism is a topic that is also linked to his films. He often deals sympathetically with the theme of a repressed woman operating within the strict confines of duty in an attempt to fulfill her proper role, while clearly reflecting a lack of fulfillment in, for example, Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thompson), The Ice Storm’s Elena Hood (Joan Allen), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). Ang Lee’s films are known for being female-centered—the roles for actresses in his films are developed and nuanced. From the exploration of sisterly bonds in Sense and Sensibility and Eat Drink Man Woman, to the dissection of female sexuality in The Ice Storm, and the female-driven martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee is known for his focus on feminine concerns. Often his films have multiple storylines which follow the inner lives of his female protagonists and give them equal or greater screen time than the men. Some examples include the highly complex interweaving of storylines in Eat Drink Man Woman, which chronicle six separate accounts of love affairs (two unsuccessful), and Sense and Sensiblity’s astounding exploration of two aspects of the female psyche. Special attention is given in Brokeback Mountain to the effects of the men’s choices on the women in their lives, particularly their wives and daughters. By the same token, Lee has often characterized his principal male figures as weak or indecisive. Some examples of this are Sense and Sensibility’s Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), The Ice Storm’s Ben Hood (Kevin Kline), and even Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat), who becomes distracted by the young Jen (Zhang Ziyi) and waits until it is too late (he is dying) to declare his love for Shu Lien.
The Outsider. Ang Lee’s films deal with questions of “the outsider”—a character who is excluded by a difference of language, cultural codes of behavior, race, or even sexual orientation. For example, the three films in his early trilogy invoke representations of the resultant hybridized and postmodernized identity of the younger, Westernized generation, leaving the traditional patriarch as the “outsider.” The diasporic global identity of Westernized Taiwanese, such as the Taiwan-American characters of Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet, or the Westernized daughters in Eat Drink Man Woman, conflicts with traditional Chinese values, calling into question the legitimacy of the traditional “father figure” role. Ride with the Devil chronicles the growing friendship between two “outsiders” fighting on the side of the South in Civil War America: German immigrant Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) become unlikely friends as they continue to face the disrespect, insults, and abuse of their fellow Southerners. Similarly, in Brokeback Mountain, Lee explores the issue of homosexuality in 1960s rural America, where Ennis (Heath Ledger) and Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) feel like outsiders as they face the restrictions of traditional social expectations; in Taking Woodstock, he revisits this idea through Elliot Teichberg’s (Demetri Martin) odyssey of self-discovery that takes place under the watchful eye of his more conservative parents. With the topic of “the outsider” or “the foreigner,” he taps into a wealth of personal experience due to his own cultural displacement—Lee’s empathy for his “unacceptable” characters comes through very strongly in all of his films (although his struggle to win the viewer’s sympathy for Hulk proved to be almost too far a stretch).
Family. The theme of the family, especially the different generations within the same family, is one which characterizes each of Ang Lee’s films. His early trilogy dealt heavily with father/son and father/daughter relationships. Sense and Sensibility had representatives from four different generations of women,4 The Ice Storm was as much about the teenage children as about their parents, and Ride with the Devil focused on an entire generation of young, disenfranchised Southern men. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon brought generational conflicts to the fore, as the mature older couple differed greatly in codes of conduct from the younger generation. Hulk was principally about children trapped by their parents’ negative legacies. The screenplay of Brokeback Mountain filled in extensive backstory for the characters Ennis and Jack, greatly expanding on Annie Proulx’s original descriptions of their parents, wives, and children, including two memorable Thanksgiving dinner scenes contrasting their two families. In Lust/Caution, the loss of family ties during wartime, especially the absence of paternal love, drives Wang Chia-chih into the dangerous psychological vulnerability upon which the entire plot hinges. Finally, Taking Woodstock and Life of Pi are both “coming-of-age” stories that deal heavily with the influence of family: both films feature the protagonist coming to terms with parental control versus the personal freedom to forge a new identity as a mature adult.
The Long Take and Framing. Finally, the signature film techniques of Ang Lee include his use of the long take and framing (positioning the shot within a static frame) to tell the story from a distance. In this way the actors’ bodies, gestures, and posture can be used in silence as telling details to advance the narrative. This allows the actors to find their own movements and spaces, and to interact with their quotidian surroundings in the most unexpected ways. This technique of filming is common among Chinese film directors of Taiwan New Cinema, especially Hou Hsiao-hsien, a point which will be discussed further in this chapter. The use of framing to tell the story slows the pace of the film; the shot is measured and deliberate, and the actor in the frame must perform using his or her entire body, from head to toe, rather than just his or her facial expression and voice. The long take also allows the viewer to study and observe the actor, coming to know and being moved by his or her humanity. One example of this is the early sequence from Pushing Hands in which the American daughter-in-law, Martha (Deb Snyder), and the Chinese father-in-law, Master Chu (Sihung Lung), sit with their backs to each other, together and yet apart, expressing an aching loneliness caused by cultural difference. Later, when, without speaking, they clean up the kitchen together, their hands finally work in tandem. Another example is the scene from Sense and Sensibility in which Hugh Grant as Edward Ferrars and Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood attempt to communicate but their body language nonetheless expresses the social restrictions that subconsciously govern their actions. Lee describes this scene in a 1996 interview: “I insisted they should just sit there for one long shot, with Hugh Grant’s face in shadow, not being able to move, or touch each other. … I think that’s very Chinese.”5 Finally, there are the opening scenes of Brokeback Mountain, in which the two young ranch hands stand apart silently in a dusty parking lot, sizing each other up. This silence between two young cowboys, inexpressive because of their habit of never speaking unless they need to, rings very true, and the scene is narrated completely through physical signs and bodily posture.
Lee’s early films were considered as part of the rubric of Taiwan New Wave Cinema, largely a movement in the 1980s, which borrows its name from the French New Wave movement. (Later critics have revised the treatment of Taiwan New Wave and, for the sake of clarity, grouped together all of the filmmakers from the Taiwan New Wave period and afterward as “Taiwan New Cinema.”) His early films do indeed share characteristics with the works of Taiwanese filmmakers Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang, which will be explored further in this chapter. However, when Lee began directing mainstream English-language films, he no longer fit neatly into this conceptualization.
Although a 1991 book edited by Chris Berry, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, marginalizes Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema by separating them from the cinema of mainland China and giving them much shorter treatment (two chapters dealing specifically with Taiwan and Hong Kong cinema versus the fourteen chapters devoted to cinema from China), Berry came to the position of wanting to fully include these cinemas within the “Chinese” diaspora. An important article by Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar deals with the topic of Chinese films and the persistence of the “national cinema” (mainland China) paradigm, and the difficulty of fitting “non-nation-state territories” of Hong Kong and Taiwan into that format.6 Berry argues that Chinese cinema is transnational just as the diaspora is transnational. Coming full circle, Chris Berry published Chinese Films in Focus (2003), representing twenty-five individual films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, without differentiating them into categories or separate sections in the table of contents. Instead, the chapters on films from these places show overlap and influence among the films from the entire Chinese-language cinematic tradition.7
As Lee’s position in world cinema has expanded, so has the academic view of what films fall under the categorization of “Chinese” cinema. In the past two decades, cinema and popular media produced in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan has been “reimagined” (to use the terminology of Rey Chow, 2000). Chow postulates that Chinese literary and cinematic studies must be reconsidered in light of globalization and cultural trends that have brought the media, celebrities, and films of Hong Kong and Taiwan together into a tradition that must necessarily be also included in the label “Chinese.” This is also the position taken by Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (1994), Sheldon H. Lu (1997), and Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2001). While the aforementioned 1994 work (by Browne et al.) used the more hesitant plural New Chinese Cinemas before combining different nations and nation-states into the same work, a monograph by Yingjin Zhang does not hesitate to appropriate Taiwan and Hong Kong into an all-inclusive Chinese National Cinema (2004). In Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s introduction to their Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (2005), the editors also face this difficulty, directly confronting it in the opening paragraph:
This collection of essays covers the cinematic traditions of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora from the beginning of Chinese film history to the present moment. In compiling a highly selective “film historiography,” as it were, we editors face once again the dilemma of choice and inclusion—namely, what constitutes “Chinese cinema” or “Chinese-language cinema”. As we attempt to come to terms with an ever-evolving phenomenon and a developing subject of investigation, we provisionally define Chinese-language films as films that use predominantly Chinese dialects and are made in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, as well as those produced through transnational collaborations with other film industries.8
This passage underscores the difficulty of defining “Chinese” cinema—it is impossible to exactly pinpoint what constitutes a “Chinese” film, not only because “Chinese” diasporas have long been scattered around the globe, but because these groups each may define and document (on film) their own experiences of what it means to be “Chinese.” Unlike other countries, too, the very borders of the nation-state known as “China” are under dispute, and often hotly contested. A brief review of more recent academic collections on Chinese cinema show a hyperawareness of this slippery, changing history: Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (Berry 1991), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, and Politics (Browne et al. 1994), Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Lu 1997), and more recently, Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film (Ng 2006).9 The founding of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas in 2007 and the pluralized title in a recent definitive study, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Rojas and Chow 2013), continue to reiterate the issue.
Finally, Gina Marchetti (2000) and others have attempted to treat Ang Lee’s films as the work of an Asian-American artist in the tradition of Wayne Wang, whose feature films on the Chinese-American community—for example, Chan Is Missing, (1982), Dim Sum (1985), Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), and The Joy Luck Club (1993)—have each received attention as Asian-American films. Marchetti concludes that The Wedding Banquet daringly serves to bridge the gap between Chinese film and Asian-American film culture:
Wai-Tung and Wei Wei continue to be Chinese, part of a greater China rather than part of a Chinese-American community (let alone an Asian-American body politic) … there has been a boom in recent years in films set in American or European Chinatowns, usually produced by Hong Kong or Taiwanese concerns (i.e., Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time is it There? and Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together). Like The Wedding Banquet, most of these films deal less with the development of an Asian-American identity among Chinese immigrants than with the creation of a transnational sense of Chinese identity.10
Marchetti quotes Lee’s characterization of his own experience being Chinese in America: “Wherever you come from, whether it’s China or Hong Kong or Taiwan, in New York, you’re just Chinese.”11 Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell W. Davis (2005) highlight Ang Lee’s deliberate preservation/presentation of his Chinese identity: “Lee’s outsider status is something he jealously guards, though in the past it was a great burden. He assiduously maintains his Chinese roots, never having applied for American citizenship.”12 Lee also labels himself: “I very much identify myself as a Chinese filmmaker. I was brought up in certain ways that influence my work … I lived in a Chinese environment until I was 23 and that is something I cannot change.”13 This statement from a 2005 interview makes it abundantly clear that Lee characterizes himself as Chinese, not Asian-American.
A History of Transnational Chinese Cinema—Some Key Figures
Although the origin of early cinematic history in China dates back to 1896—the year in which the newly-invented medium of film was first exhibited in Shanghai—the most significant developments for the purpose of this book are more recent.14 One important example is the history of the Shaw Brothers studio, whose films had an influence on the young Ang Lee. Shaw Brothers productions were very popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and their popularity influenced the whole of transnational China. Two of Lee’s own cited influences, King Hu and Li Hanxiang, were directors who worked with this studio. The Shaw brothers (originally Xiao) were from Shanghai. They had a studio in the booming film industry of the 1930s in Shanghai, but during the Chinese Civil War and followed by the Japanese invasion of World War II, the film industry was halted and the Shaw brothers moved their studios to Hong Kong. The Shaw Brothers studio, as it came to be known, became the original bedrock of the new film industry in Hong Kong, and went on to become one of the most powerful movie empires in Asia. Almost all the major films from Hong Kong’s burgeoning industry, including Li Hanxiang’s The Love Eterne (Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai, 1963), can credit some involvement from the Shaw brothers. One of the brothers, Run Run Shaw, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1977, ostensibly for his contributions to Chinese and British entertainment.
Ang Lee’s major inspiration and influence was a director working mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, King Hu (Hu Jinquan). King Hu’s martial arts masterpiece, A Touch of Zen (Xianü, credited as 1969; actually the film took four years to make, from 1968 to 1972), can be seen as a forerunner for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—Lee has publicly acknowledged his debt to the artistic mastery of Hu in his films. Born in China, King Hu was educated in an arts school in Beijing. During wartime, in 1949, he relocated to Hong Kong, and entered the film industry in 1951 in the art department. In the 1950s he began acting and in 1958 joined the Shaw Brothers studio as a writer and actor (he has a role in The Love Eterne), and later a director. In 1967 he left to start his own studio in Taiwan, and returned to Hong Kong in the 1970s. He worked in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China before his death in Taiwan in 1997. While making his grand opus A Touch of Zen, he was criticized for his overly-fastidious and time-consuming working methods. When the film was finished, he was ostracized by the major studios, after which, according to Kwai-Cheung Lo, his career “never fully recovered.”15
The first major development in film of the transnational Chinese diaspora that garnered the attention of the Western world was the phenomenon Bruce Lee, known in Asia as Li Xiaolong (or “Little Dragon”). Bruce Lee’s fame in the West was unprecedented for an Asian; his impact on transnational Chinese culture in the 1970s cannot be underestimated, for his image links Hong Kong and, by extension, the Chinese film industry, with physicality, bodily fitness and prowess, and the martial arts. He is considered a key figure in twentieth-century popular culture, for had it not been for Bruce Lee’s kung fu genre movies in the early 1970s, it is uncertain whether the martial arts film genre would have penetrated and influenced mainstream Western cinema and audiences the way it has over the past three decades. Bruce Lee was born in 1940 in the United States when his Cantonese opera-singer father was on tour in San Francisco; as a result he was given dual U.S./Hong Kong citizenship. He spent his childhood in Hong Kong, but when he was a teenager, his parents sent him back to the United States to remove him from gang warfare in Hong Kong, first to northern California and then to Seattle, where he enrolled at the University of Washington to study philosophy. There, he met Linda Emery, whom he later married, and eventually dropped out of school to focus on developing his career as a stunt artist. His stunts eventually brought him to the attention of Los Angeles television producers, and he was contracted to appear in the U.S. television series The Green Hornet (1966–67). This constituted the first major visibility for an Asian star in the United States; however, in reality he merely reached cult status among connoisseurs of kung fu action film. Returning to Hong Kong, he made four movies before he died in mysterious circumstances.16 His last film, Enter the Dragon (1973) was released posthumously, cementing his status as a cult hero who died young.17
Despite the towering status of Bruce Lee, it was not until the 1980s that the average filmgoer in the West had any interest in or knowledge about Chinese cinema. Interest began in 1985, when Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984), produced at the Guangxi Studio in China, made a significant impact at international film festivals. This is also the same year that the success of Jackie Chan’s movies such as Project A (A jihua, 1983) and Police Story (Jingcha gushi, 1985) began to bring him a reputation in Asia that was, for the first time, on the scale of Bruce Lee’s. In 1987, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, while not specifically a “Chinese-made” film, grabbed headlines as a cultural watershed, signifying growing Western interest in China. The Last Emperor was the first Western film made in and about China to be produced with full support of the Chinese government since 1949, and the first feature film in history granted permission to be filmed in the Forbidden City. In 1988, it won all of the nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director. The stunning sweep at the Academy Awards, and the beauty of the film itself, raised international awareness and consciousness of China. This film also attracted international interest in actor John Lone (Hong Kong) and the Chinese megastar Joan Chen. Also in 1988, M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, won the 1988 Tony Award for best play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Broadway play, the John Gassner Award for best American play, and the Drama Desk Award for best new play, again drawing international attention to China, and to the actor B. D. Wong, who played the principal role of Song Liling. (The 1993 film version starred Hong Kong actor John Lone.) The year 1988 was also a watershed for mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose film Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1987) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, the first film from China to win a top international award. In 1990, Zhang Yimou made Judou (with funding from Japan), which won a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the first Chinese film to reach this category. The Chinese government, which had banned the film in China, protested the nomination and prevented Zhang from attending the ceremony. In 1991, Zhang followed this with Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogao gua), with funding from Taiwan. Again, the film was banned in China, but was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (this time as the Hong Kong entry). Actress Gong Li became a name known in the West primarily because of her performance in this film.
Beginning in the 1990s, a number of major stars from China, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia have broken through from regional popularity to international recognition. One example is Jet Li (Li Lianjie), originally from China, and now based in Hong Kong. Jet Li is principally known for his kung fu movies, especially Shaolin Temple (Shaolin si, 1982), which he made before he was twenty years old; this film is generally credited with starting the 1980s kung fu boom in China. He is also known for Once Upon a Time in China (Huang Feihong, 1991), based on the legendary Chinese martial artist Wong Fei Hung (Huang Feihong). He began to enjoy limited international recognition after costarring in his first American-produced movie, Lethal Weapon 4 (1998); this was also the first time he had ever played a villain. Romeo Must Die (2000) was made with the plan to give Jet Li crossover status, and with this film he received greater international recognition, especially when his costar in the film, Aaliyah, was killed in a plane crash in 2001. He cemented his international status with Hero (2002), a high-grossing and highly-stylized martial arts film that is often compared to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Li departed from his usual martial arts action films with the drama Unleashed (also known as Danny the Dog, 2005), a somber, meditative film costarring dramatic actors Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman. More recently, he appeared with Sylvester Stallone and other giants of the action film genre in The Expendables (2010, with sequels in 2012 and 2014).
Hong Kong–based actor Chow Yun-fat, the male lead in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, made his start in television, but has since become one of Asia’s best-loved actors and biggest stars. In 1986, the success of the fast-paced gangster film A Better Tomorrow (Yinxiong bense, 1986), directed by John Woo, propelled Chow Yun-fat to international recognition. His enormous popularity in Asia soon made him an icon on the level of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Further hard-edged roles in more John Woo crime films increased Chow’s popularity as fans all over the world flocked to see A Better Tomorrow 2 (Yinxiong bense II, 1987), The Killer (Diexue shuangxiong, 1989), and Hard Boiled (Lashou shentan, 1992). With the phenomenal global interest in the Hong Kong action genre, Chow Yun-fat decided to try his luck in the United States film industry and appeared in The Replacement Killers (1998) with Mira Sorvino, and The Corruptor (1999) with Mark Wahlberg. Next he took on his first attempt at a romantic lead in English, starring with Jodie Foster in Anna and the King (1999). Chow then returned to the Asian cinema circuit and took on an unusual role (he was not formerly trained in martial arts) in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Following that, working with renowned director Zhang Yimou, Chow Yun-fat played Emperor Ping in China’s Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jindai huangjinjia, 2006). Again returning to Hollywood, Chow played the demonic pirate captain Sao Feng in the third installment of Pirates of the Carribbean (2007).
Chow Yun-fat’s costar from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is Michelle Yeoh. Born in 1962 in the mining town of Ipoh, in Western Malaysia, Yeoh’s ethnically Chinese parents taught her Malay and English some time before she learned Cantonese. She began ballet dancing at the age of four, and, inspired by Fame (1980), she enrolled in England’s Royal Academy of Dance, where she eventually earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. Though a back injury ended her career as a ballerina, she had the opportunity while in England to act in student dramas, including productions of Shakespeare. After returning to Malaysia she won a national beauty pageant in 1983. From there, she appeared in a television commercial with Jackie Chan that caught the attention of a fledgling film production company called D&B Films. She continued to produce martial arts films in Hong Kong in quick succession until her career took off internationally following her showstopping performance in Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992), where she matched the notoriously fearless Jackie Chan stunt for stunt. At the beginning of the shoot, Chan was skeptical as to whether women could fight, preferring them to look pretty and to sit on the sidelines. By the end of the film, Chan was legitimately concerned that he might be upstaged. Yeoh’s hair-raising high-speed motorcycle jump onto a moving train (she learned how to drive the motorbike the day before the stunt) was bested only by Chan’s death-defying leap from a minaret to an airborne rope ladder hanging from a helicopter hundreds of feet above Kuala Lumpur. The film was a massive success, making Yeoh the highest paid actress in Asia. From there it was easy to take on the role of the next Bond girl in the eighteenth installment of the 007 series, Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Her success with Lee’s film has led to her reprising her leading role of Yu Shu Lien in the Weinstein Company’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon II: The Green Destiny (filming in 2014).
Tony Leung Chiu-wai, a Hong Kong actor with ancestry in Taishan, Guangdong, in southern China, is the latest actor to emerge to grand international acclaim under the directorship of Ang Lee. The actor, who plays the complex leading role of a duplicitous government agent in Lee’s Lust/Caution (Se jie, 2007), got his beginnings from partnering with Maggie Cheung in iconoclastic director Wong Kar-wai’s films. Leung is known mainly for playing intense, black-sheep characters as a corrupting influence against his upstanding protagonist costars. Tony Leung first gained international exposure through Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. However, many consider Leung’s role in John Woo’s 1992 action film Hard Boiled (where he acted with Chow Yun-fat) his breakthrough role. Leung often collaborates with Wong Kar-wai and has appeared in many of his films: his most notable roles for this director include the lonely policeman in Chungking Express (1994), a homosexual Chinese expatriate living in Argentina in Happy Together, and a repressed victim of adultery in In the Mood for Love, for which he won the Best Actor award at Cannes. He also had a key role in the Zhang Yimou epic Hero.
Jackie Chan’s career has been unique and far-reaching. Born into a poor family and apprenticed at the age of seven to an opera school, he studied there under a cruel headmaster in Dickensian conditions. Entering stunt work in film after graduation, he sought to replace the vacuum left by the death of Bruce Lee, and eventually hit on the idea to package his martial arts with a self-deferential style of comedy inspired by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. This proved to be a winning formula, and he made many films and became a popular star in Asia with the trademark of performing his own stunts, allowing no sex or bad language in his films, and including a reel of outtakes of unsuccessful stunts at the end of the film during the closing credits. He desired to conquer Hollywood as he had Asia, but this success proved more elusive as he made two flops with foreign directors; clearly, he had not yet hit on the right timbre to present himself to a Western audience. After studying English for two years in Beverly Hills, he headed back to Hong Kong. His madcap, over-the-top brand of comedy/adventure did not catch on in the West until he made the Rush Hour series (1998, 2001, and 2007), partnered with Chris Tucker. Even more hilarious and extreme were the farces Shanghai Noon (2000) and Shanghai Knights (2003), made with actor Owen Wilson, which lampooned every cliché in the western genre from John Wayne to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid–style buddy movies. These films were truly silly, but Jackie Chan’s ebullient personality came through to Western audiences. In the first of the Rush Hour films, there is a scene in which Chan grabs hold with both hands and hangs from a “Hollywood” street sign in a visual reminder that he has “arrived” in Hollywood.18
The style of Jackie Chan’s slapstick humor and Hong Kong kung fu movies is distinctly different from the high-minded Asian aesthetic presented by mainland Chinese filmmakers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou (which Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien seem to share). Fredric Dannen (1995) argues that these directors are shaped by linguistic forces, i.e., the madcap, cartoonish style of Hong Kong films is driven by the “wildness” of Cantonese, with its earthiness, roughshod humor, and penchant for expletives; the portentous and slow Mandarin-made films produced in China are reflective of Mandarin’s more serious, and even elitist, side. Hollywood directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have acknowledged the influence of Hong Kong directors John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark on their work, attracted to the no-holds-barred approach to action, exuberant gags, and excessive stirring up of emotions.19 Meanwhile, directors from mainland China offer more elitist, highbrow fare; for example, Zhang Yimou’s Judou, Raise the Red Lantern, and Yellow Earth are emblematic of the so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers’ stylistic and political rejection of the Maoist legacy. Zhang Yimou makes somber films that focus on the lower classes, such as the life of peasants in China. At the same time, Chen Kaige’s intelligent and historic Chinese epic Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji, 1993) does a wonderful job portraying the complex and often uneasy love affair between the two stage brothers, while also managing to skillfully express profound themes that resonate throughout the film: fate, loyalty, class struggle, the parallels between opera and life.
From the above we can see how some of the groundwork was laid for the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Performers and directors from the transnational territories of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, such as King Hu, Bruce Lee, John Woo, Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Edward Yang, and Hou Hsiao-hsien, have helped pave the way for Ang Lee’s stunning success. Lee’s work, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, does not exist in a vacuum; the film can be placed within networks of intertextual connections: genre connections, the work of King Hu, and Li Hanxiang’s The Love Eterne. The films of Ang Lee can also be viewed in conjunction with thematically similar films from the Chinese diaspora (globalization, homosexuality, etc.). The success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon blurs what may be called the boundary between mainland Chinese cinema and a more internationally-based “Chinese-language cinema.” The film was made by a Taiwanese director, but its leads include Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland Chinese actors and actresses while the funding is from overseas. This merging of people, resources, and expertise from these three regions seems to imply big-budgeted Chinese-language cinema is moving toward an international arena looking to compete with the best Hollywood films.
A Short History of Taiwan Cinema
In understanding Taiwan’s history and Taiwanese identity, it is important to understand the short but troubled history of Taiwan in the past century. Taiwan, historically dominated by China, had been colonized by Japan from 1895 to 1945 (previously, Taiwan had been ceded to Japan following China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895; Japan’s control of Taiwan ended with Japan’s surrender in World War II in 1945, when Taiwan once again came under Chinese control). Within a few years, Taiwan was under the control of Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT (Kuomintang) government, which had fled to Taiwan (1947–49) to escape the rising Communist army in China. The KMT under Chiang Kai-shek established Taiwan as the “Republic of China” in 1949. The KMT government officials, through the 1950s-1970s, lived in a state of interminable waiting, looking forward to the eventual overthrow of the Communist government on the mainland, and believing themselves to be the repositors of the real China. Thus, the people of Taiwan who had lived first under the colonizing influence of Japan, and then under the strict military rule of the KMT government whose initial focus was to regain power in China, could not easily establish a national identity. To confuse the issue of identity even further, in 1972 the People’s Republic of China took over the seat formerly occupied by Taiwan in the United Nations, forcing Taiwan to withdraw. This caused Taiwan to become an international nonentity, as the majority of countries began to recognize the People’s Republic of China and shift their allegiance to the Communist government in Beijing. This was the beginning of Taiwan’s late-twentieth-century “identity crisis” in the international arena—politically, the island was relegated to a state of international diplomatic nonexistence, a problem that to this day has found no easy solution.
In the 1970s, Taiwan noted the successes of Hong Kong’s cinema as a boon to the economy, and this led the KMT government to promote its film industry in the early 1980s. This coincided with the change in the political situation in Taiwan. The strict military rule under Chiang Kai-shek was lessened by his death in 1975, and the son who succeeded him, Chiang Ching-kuo, began to lift the restrictions on cultural and artistic expression. The former government-controlled entertainment—serialized costume melodramas, low-budget kung fu movies, insubstantial comedies, and “Healthy Realist” propaganda cinema promoted by the KMT—had provided mere escapism for Taiwanese audiences; this was a genre cinema producing generic films, utilizing the conventional code and language of the different genres, rather than innovating or speaking with a creative or distinctly Taiwanese voice. Early examples of Taiwan New Cinema were government-financed, and were thus operating under the specter of possible censorship. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien ran into this difficulty with A City of Sadness, released just two years after the end of the 40-year period of martial law. Despite new levels of artistic freedom, Hou Hsiao-hsien faced government criticism and censorship when he released his most provocative film, dealing with the sensitive events of February 28, 1947 (also known as the 228 Incident, referring to the date). The 228 Incident was an uprising in Taiwan that was brutally suppressed by the Kuomintang government, resulting in the massacre of between ten thousand and thirty thousand civilians. Previously, tensions between the local Taiwanese and mainlanders from China had gradually increased since Taiwan had been placed under the administrative control of the Republic of China from Japan two years earlier. The violence began on February 27, 1947, in Taipei, when a dispute between a female cigarette vendor and an antismuggling officer triggered civil disorder and open rebellion lasting several days; the uprising was quickly and brutally suppressed by the ROC Army. Although Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film was censored by the KMT in Taiwan, in September 1989, A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion award at the 46th Venice International Film Festival. Only after the film won international acclaim did the government relent and allow the film open distribution in Taiwan.
Taiwanese films are increasingly recognized as an important development in the arena of world cinema, in terms of both aesthetic quality and for their liberalizing effects on Taiwan government and society. The major Taiwan film directors who have won international attention and acclaim are Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang. Hou Hsiao-hsien was one of the key figures in the early cinematic movement known as Taiwan New Wave; this term has been used to describe a cycle of socially-critical films from the 1980s which share the characteristics of probing Taiwanese history, society, and identity through dramatizing current sociopolitical and economic tensions. The filmmakers of the Taiwan New Wave, beginning around 1982 and continuing through the late 1980s, shared certain themes and concerns, investigating complex social realities that had been previously ignored or suppressed by rigorous censorship. These directors defined a national Taiwanese cinema as well as defining Taiwanese history and identity. Although a number of Taiwanese scholars and critics still use the term “Taiwan New Wave” to describe a short period of creative cinematic output in the 1980s, this movement has been broadened by subsequent scholarship and is now given the more loosely-based title “Taiwan New Cinema.”
Characteristics of Taiwan New Cinema
The clearest example of the phenomenon of Taiwan New Cinema is the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose politically-challenging films were made just as Taiwanese history was in the process of major change. In 1983, in an early project sponsored by the government, Hou directed a segment in a three-story anthology film entitled The Sandwich Man (Erzi de da wanou, 1983). This film is one of the first post-KMT-rule works of cinema to use native Taiwanese dialect instead of restricting itself to Mandarin—defying a precept of government censorship. Hou followed this film’s success with several autobiographical films and personal stories of friends growing up in Taiwan. These films included The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui lai de ren, 1983), Summer at Grandpa’s (Dongdong de jiaqi, 1984), and his own personal story, A Time to Live and A Time to Die (Tongnian wangshi, 1985). This film courageously deals with the theme of displacement and disorientation felt by people of his parents’ and grandparents’ generation who had come over from mainland China with the idea of soon returning; instead, they are obsessed with the past and the lost world of old China. Meanwhile, their son, Hsiao, born in Taiwan, is uninterested in these stories since only the life he has known in Taiwan has real meaning for him. This film won the Critics’ Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, the first major international recognition for Taiwan New Cinema. Finally, following both the formal establishment of an opposing party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in 1986, the lifting of martial law in 1987, and the 1988 inauguration of Taiwan’s first native-born president, Lee Teng-hui, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s most controversial film, A City of Sadness, finally found the climate in which it could survive and be made. As noted, the film’s Golden Lion award led to the government retracting its suppression of the film. This was a watershed moment in the development of Taiwan New Cinema.
Another striking feature of Taiwan New Cinema that defined it more or less as a cinematic movement was the great amount of shared subject matter, as well as a solidarity of vision and intercollaboration among the filmmakers. Taiwanese critic Hsiung-ping Chiao details these collaborations in a 1990 article about Taiwan cinema; for example, many of the films were based on the screenwriters’ own autobiographical experiences. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die deals with the director’s own childhood; his Summer at Grandpa’s is the coming-of-age story of author Chu T’ien-wen; his Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen, 1986) was based on the life story of the film’s writer, Wu Nien-chen.20 In addition, major directors collaborated on film anthologies; two examples are In Our Time (Guangyin de gushi, 1982), a collection of short narrative films by four directors including Tao De-chen, Edward Yang, Ko I-cheng, and Chang Yi, which is widely credited with establishing the tone and subject matter of what would become Taiwan New Cinema, and The Sandwich Man, with segments by three different directors based on three short stories by author Huang Chun-ming. In his excellent study of 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, Douglas Kellner (1998) points out that this focus on rural stories was a result of the burgeoning “rural literature” movement—a growing movement in Taiwanese literature that aimed to preserve stories from Taiwan’s agrarian past and expose the harmful impact of urbanization on traditional Taiwanese society. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s short film Son’s Big Doll (Erzi de da wanou) in The Sandwich Man was influenced by the rural literature movement. The Sandwich Man is largely known for its first segment directed by Hou, which showcased his directorial gifts; the film also helped to establish Taiwan New Cinema as a “legitimate artistic movement.”21 As an example of the type of personal commitment these artists contributed to collaborative efforts within the movement, Hou Hsiao-hsien performed the leading male role in Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (Qingmei zhuma, 1985), as well as mortgaging his own home to finance and produce it. (Hou lost his investment when the film, which portrayed the hubris and denouement in the relationship between a young couple, was pulled from theaters within four days.)22
A further unique element of Taiwan New Cinema is a distinct cinematic language and style shared among the directors, particularly Hou Hsaio-hsien, Tseng Chuang-hsiang, and Edward Yang. These films all run at a slow, meditative pace, with a choppy or interrupted narrative style consisting of fragmentary scenes and unexpected episodic cuts. The viewer is challenged to construct the narrative to produce the complete story. The Taiwan New Cinema film has a meandering structure without a standard beginning, middle, and end and lacks the narrative pacing of conventional films. Within the films’ narrative structure, there are jumps in time—for example, Edward Yang’s edits cut from an earlier scene to a later scene months or even years later without an explanation, so that the viewer is forced to fill in the blanks. Also in his films, the actors are often at the screen’s periphery, or even offscreen. In terms of technique, Hou Hsiao-hsien commonly uses a static camera setup in a long shot, with few edits and close-ups. Thus the viewers can gradually become familiar with the scene, as an observer would. Taiwan New Cinema uses many outdoor locations to evoke the nostalgia for rural and agriculturally-centered, premodern Taiwan, or to display the contrasting human-less modern cityscape. Another feature of Taiwan New Cinema is that nonprofessional actors are often used, with the filmmakers themselves appearing in each other’s movies (see example of Edward Yang’s Taipei Story, above).
Ang Lee’s Position in Taiwan New Cinema
Ang Lee has been classified as a member of Taiwan New Cinema, especially due to his early trilogy films, but he is generally considered to be part of a post-1980s “second wave,” together with director Tsai Ming-liang. Both Lee’s and Tsai Ming-liang’s work can be seen to have roots within the earlier 1980s movement, with similarities in their work to Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. For example, Tsai uses long shots, strange fragmentary cuts, and lengthy scenes. He also tends to use the same actors again and again. Meanwhile, Lee uses nonprofessional actors, such as his own son and Winston Chao, and his early films use similar casts, especially Sihung Lung as the traditional Chinese father figure in his early trilogy films. The subject matter of both Lee’s and Tsai’s films also reflects some of the topics which first intrigued the makers of Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s. For example, Tsai’s film What Time Is It There? (Ni nabian jidian, 2001) deals with modernity, globalization, and postmodern apprehension of spaces, as the lead character, stagnating in Taipei, becomes obsessed with the faraway city of Paris. Lee’s films Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman also deal with the topics of modernity, cultural identity, and globalization.
Below are a series of characteristics that Ang Lee’s films share with the filmmakers of Taiwan New Cinema.
Construction of identity. Similar to Lee’s recurrent treatment of the topic of identity in his films, the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien are concerned with the exploration and construction of his own personal identity in Taiwan. Hou’s family, following his father, moved to Taiwan only two years before the separation from mainland China. As is suggested in his film A City of Sadness, Hou has appropriated the island as his homeland because he was born in Taiwan and has lived there all his life; on the other hand, his parents cannot help feeling that they are exiles who cannot return to China, their true home. They reconstruct an identity in the new country where it was once thought they would stay only a few months, after the Nationalist retreat, but now are destined to live the rest of their lives. Taiwan, for Hou, represents an irredeemable place of exile, loss, and emptiness. From his childhood memories, he also longs for the sense of village-life community which, due to modernization and urbanization, has been removed behind thick walls.
Globalization and modernization. Films that are notable for similarity in theme with Ang Lee’s work include Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Yiyi, 2000), which won him the Best Director award at Cannes that year. This is another film that underscores the question of reimagining self-identity and ethical engagement in the face of change brought on by globalization and modernization. In this film, the grandmother and matriarch of the Wu family has a sudden stroke and goes into a coma on the day of her son’s wedding; the story details the effect of this awareness of mortality on the Wu family, especially her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. The bleak urban cityscapes of Taipei, especially scenes of unrelenting traffic and a cold, sterile hotel room where a teenager prepares for her first sexual experience, are used to demonstrate the oppressiveness and inhumanity of the postmodern urban environment. In an earlier Edward Yang film, The Terrorizer (Kongbu fenzi, 1986), Fredric Jameson (1994) notes the film’s overlap of traditional space (an old-style barracks apartment), national space (the hospital), multinational space (the publisher’s office, a glass high-rise in which global media is manufactured), and transnational anonymity (in a hotel corridor, the sameness of identical bedrooms). Jameson emphasizes the importance of spatiality in The Terrorizer by describing it as “a film about urban space” and “an anthology of enclosed apartments,”23 demonstrating how Taiwan New Cinema’s focus on postmodern spaces reflects an increasingly globalized and postmodern culture that transcends national boundaries.
Homosexuality. Similar to Ang Lee’s open treatment of the subject of homosexuality in The Wedding Banquet, the films of Tsai Ming-liang, a Malaysian-born director working from Taiwan, are another example to demonstrate the identity confusion and homosexuality which characterize post-“economic miracle” Taiwan. Tsai’s Vive L’Amour (Aiqing wansui, 1994) won the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice International Film Festival. This film is the second in a three-part series of films, which also includes Rebels of the Neon God (Qingshaonian natuo, 1992), and The River (Heliu, 1997), all films which have been discussed at the academic level primarily for their explorations of existential anxiety and loneliness in the millennial metropolis of Taipei. The three films also deal with homosexuality in the wake of this postmodern fragmentation of society and the traditional Chinese family, especially during the significant rise of homosexuality in the 1990s following the Taiwan Kuomintang government’s lifting of martial law in 1987.
Autobiography. Just as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Summer at Grandpa’s, and Dust in the Wind were based on true stories of his own life or the lives of his collaborators, Ang Lee’s first three films, Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman, all deal with his own feelings of cultural disconnection (as an outsider living in the United States) or his struggle with his own “father figure.” While Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman do not directly tell an autobiographical account of Lee’s childhood as other Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers do, the three films in his trilogy do speak about the filmmaker obliquely in an autobiographical way (more on this in the chapters devoted to these films).
Repeated use of actors (also untrained actors). Ang Lee shares this similarity with Tsai Ming-liang, who likes to use his favorite actors again and again in his films, and Hou and the group from 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, who often appeared in each other’s films. (Notably, this is also a trait of Hong Kong films, especially those of Wong Kar-wai, which frequently feature Tony Leung.) Lee had Sihung Lung play the central role of the Chinese patriarch in each of his “Father-Knows-Best” trilogy films. (Sihung Lung also appeared as Sir Te in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) Ah-Leh Gua also appeared in two of Lee’s early trilogy films, as did Winston Chao (along with his main role as the gay son in The Wedding Banquet, he played a supporting role in Eat Drink Man Woman, as the skillful, slightly cynical business associate Li Kai). Similarly, actor Tobey Maguire played a leading role in both The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil, and was originally cast in a significant role in Life of Pi (he was eventually replaced by Rafe Spall because Lee realized during filming that Maguire’s recognizable face would be too distracting to audiences). In his early trilogy films, Ang Lee also used untrained actors, such as his own son, Haan, who played the role of the young son of Martha and Alex (Bo Z. Wang) in Pushing Hands. In Eat Drink Man Woman, the young girl Shan-Shan (Yu-Chien Tang) is filmed at her school; the classmates who surround her as she opens her fragrant lunchbox are her real friends. The central actor in The Wedding Banquet, Winston Chao, was a retired flight attendant who had never before appeared in a feature film. Jane Lin, Haan, and youngest son, Mason, also appeared in The Wedding Banquet. Additionally, it is notable that Lee selected the unknown Suraj Sharma, an untrained teenager who had not even intended to audition for the film, to play the central role in Life of Pi.
Historical Context of Ang Lee’s Academy Awards for Best Director
As noted, in 2006, Ang Lee became the first Asian to win an Academy Award for Best Director, a distinct achievement on the international stage—and one made even more indelible by his second win in 2013. Though many Asian directors, especially Jackie Chan and John Woo, have tried to storm Hollywood, and others, such as Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, and Zhang Yimou, have achieved honors in the international film community with art-house successes, Lee’s history-making first Academy Award for Best Director was for Brokeback Mountain, a distinctly un-Asian film. As detailed in chapter 1, while he had previously been overlooked for awards with his English-language films (Sense and Sensibility was nominated but only won a single award, for screenwriter Emma Thompson), his Chinese films have always done well at the Academy Awards. Both The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman in 1993 and 1994 garnered Foreign Language Film nominations, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon won Best Foreign Language Film in the 2001 Academy Awards. Thus, of the first four Chinese-language films that Lee made, only Pushing Hands went unmentioned at the Academy Awards. This track record set Ang Lee on a course for success. Disappointed not to be nominated for directing Sense and Sensibility in 1995, he apologized to Taiwan for failing to bring his homeland the honor of an Academy Award that year. When he set out to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he made no secret of his desire to win an Academy Award with the film.
The only other Asian auteur to reach worldwide recognition at a level similar to Ang Lee was Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who never advanced to win the Best Director or Best Film at the Academy Awards. Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) received an honorary foreign-language film award. Because this film was so widely admired for being ahead of its time, yet received so little recognition in the way of international awards, many believe this film was responsible for the creation of the new category, Best Foreign Film, at the Academy Awards. Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975) won Best Foreign Language Film in 1976. He was nominated for Best Director with Ran (1985), and received an honorary Academy Award in 1990. However, Kurosawa’s films never broke into the Best Picture category.
Another Japanese filmmaker, Hiroshi Teshigahara, was nominated in the Best Director category for Woman in the Dunes (1964), the first non-Caucasian director ever nominated. The 24-year-old African-American director/writer John Singleton was nominated in 1991 for his directorial debut about South Central Los Angeles gang violence in the ghetto, Boyz N the Hood (1991). This film earned two nominations and no wins. Singleton became the youngest nominee for Best Director in Academy history, and the first African-American to be nominated as Best Director.
Back in 2000, before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for the Best Foreign Film category, an interviewer asked Ang Lee if he hoped for a Best Film nomination. He answered:
I’ll go with the wave. It’s an achievement if a Chinese-language film is recognized. There are a bunch of great filmmakers in Asia, but the Oscars is something else. I grew up with subtitles and it’s so unfair—it’s time for the [American] public to read. There’s a big world out there that has a lot to offer. The cultural exchange is so one-way. … It would be great satisfaction to me for the film to break outside the art-house into the shopping malls.24
While Lee’s first win was for a distinctly American subject, in 2013 he won for directing Life of Pi, a film (containing subtitles for spoken French) that reflects the influences of globalization (with a boy from India on a Japanese cargo ship with a French cook and a Taiwanese crew bound for Canada), demonstrating how far Lee—and the entire film industry—has come since Lee first voiced these aspirations in 2000. With Lee’s second win as Best Director at the Academy Awards in 2013, he became the only Asian to win the award not just once but twice, as well as joining a very select group of directors honored more than once, including John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Oliver Stone, and Steven Spielberg.25
Ang Lee’s Influences as a Director
In the March 9, 2001, issue of the New York Times, Ang Lee appeared in a series of discussions with noted directors, actors, cinematographers, screenwriters, and others in the filmmaking industry. Some of the previous subjects in the series had been Quentin Tarantino, Janusz Kaminski, Ron Howard, Kevin Costner, Curtis Hanson, and Stephen Soderbergh. The format of the series was to have each subject select and discuss a film that had a personal meaning to him or her. Lee brought up a short list of directors and films from abroad that had emotionally affected him as a young man, including Fellini’s Roma (1972). Other films he mentioned include Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953), Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring, 1960), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962). Another early influence was Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967). As a first-year student at the Academy, Lee saw The Graduate three times in a row (staying in the theater for two extra showings), and would never forget the eye-opening inspiration the film was to him.26 He conceded that, because of the limitations of the film industry in Taiwan both economically and politically in the years he was growing up, he had not seen any films from abroad before the age of 18. Before the rise of Taiwan New Cinema, Italian Neorealism was introduced to Taiwan to great acclaim, demonstrating the high public opinion and official sanction of “realism,” and strongly influencing the younger generation of Taiwanese filmmakers, including Lee.27 Seeing Fellini’s Roma was the first time he realized that “movies could do more than tell me a story. … These are the movies that affect you so deeply that you feel that you are a different person from the one who went into the theater.”28 Ang Lee was being trained in the language, texture, and power of art-house filmmaking.
The film that Ang Lee chose to discuss as a seminal influence was Li Hanxiang’s Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai (1963), a Chinese opera also known as The Butterfly Lovers. In the interview the film was called Qi Cai Hu Bu Gui, as the opera is sometimes titled. This film was produced by the heavily influential Shaw Brothers’ Hong Kong studio. The narrative shares similarities with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, both in its subject matter and cultural significance. Lee himself translated the title as Love Eternal, although the film is more commonly known as The Love Eterne; this is the English title that accompanies the film. In May 1963, The Love Eterne set records in Taiwan for the longest theater run (186 days), screenings (930), and tickets sold (721,929, approximately 90 percent of the Taipei population at the time).29 Lee had chosen this film because it reminded him of his “innocence.” As a nine-year-old boy living in Hualian in his traditional Chinese household and with dreams of the heroes of traditional China, when he first saw the film it was forever associated in his mind with this type of innocence and sweet, childlike dreaminess.
I think that for every movie I make, I always try to duplicate that feeling of purity and innocence that I got when I first saw this movie [The Love Eterne]. I bring in Western drama. I bring in metaphor. I bring in Jean-Luc Godard. Whatever I bring in to my own films, I am forever trying to update and recapture that feeling.30
The unabashedly romantic plot of The Love Eterne concerns a young girl, Zhu Yingtai (played by Le Di), from a wealthy family, who wishes to receive a higher education, and so convinces her parents to let her dress up as a boy in order to attend an all-male school. There, she befriends a male student, Liang Shanbo (played by Ling Po), and the two have a close relationship. She falls in love with him and tries to confess her secret, but because of shyness, she can never summon the courage to tell him. When she is suddenly forced to return home, she discovers her parents have arranged her betrothal to another man, the son of a prominent family. She is caught between fidelity to her father’s wishes and to her own heart. Meanwhile, the male student she loves has learned the truth about her gender, and, in delight, he sets off to her hometown to propose marriage. However, when he hears of her engagement to another, the blow to his heart sets him in a downward spiral of fatal illness. On the road back to the school he dies, brokenhearted, in a fit of consumptive coughing. The girl hears of this and thus agrees to the arranged marriage, with the stipulation that the wedding party must pass by her former love’s gravesite. While passing the grave, she tears off her wedding clothes to reveal funeral garments underneath. A storm pounds the site, splitting open the grave, and she runs to be united with her former love, who appears from the grave as an apparition. The two are buried together in the grave by the force of the storm, but the final image shows them together sailing upward into the clouds to eternal paradise.
This film is crafted in the style of traditional Chinese opera, an art form of heightened theatricality, in which graceful movement is choreographed with music. Chinese opera is an extremely demanding art form of exacting technical training; performers of Chinese opera on the stage must be versed in four separate art forms: singing, acting, dance, and mime. Often these performers are trained from early childhood; only if apprenticed from a young age can the performer master the difficult art. The highly stylized acting and choreography in The Love Eterne comes from this tradition, in which an actor must strike a pose, reposition, and strike another pose, all in time to the music. Thus, the emotions are not played at a realistic level, but have a heightened dramatic tone that verges on the melodramatic. Another feature of traditional Chinese opera, that is reflected during the time The Love Eterne was made, is having male roles played by females. Indeed, in The Love Eterne the two main roles of the girl and her school boyfriend are played by women.
If this movie is a basis for his own films, as Ang Lee claimed in the New York Times, then there is evidence of the influence of The Love Eterne in his work, especially Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Indeed, Lee himself draws the connection between the suicide leap of the main actress Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the flight to heaven taken by Le Di and Ling Po in The Love Eterne. Truly he is a director that has kept in close touch with his childhood sensibilities. The themes of repressed emotion and sacrificing love in the face of duty are shared by both films.
It is, I think, the great Chinese theme. For the Chinese audience, it is just in our blood. You must hide your feelings. That becomes the art itself, the metaphor and the symbolism, the use of color and framing.
It is a way of not saying something but of expressing it anyway. And it is such an emotional outlet especially for a repressed society. That is the heart of both films, the repressed emotional wish.
That is the hidden dragon.31
The metaphor of being torn between duty and love is most pronounced in the film he had not yet made at the time of the New York Times interview, Brokeback Mountain. The love unable to find words, the thing untranslatable, the indescribable something in the film that “spoke to you” is what Lee calls “the juice.”32 In The Ice Storm, the “juice” comes from a single word, “embarrassment.” In Sense and Sensibility, according to Lee, it is the moment of transition, when the sisters fully connect in love and understanding to the point where each takes on more “sense” or “sensibility,” the best of the other’s personality. In Ride with the Devil, it is the discovery and clarity that maturity brings. And in Brokeback Mountain, which clearly shares roots with The Love Eterne, the viewer can see the Chinese theme of hidden, repressed emotion. Lee has stated: “If a topic isn’t terrifying enough, or sensitive enough, I won’t want to make the movie … I like to make movies about conflict, because tension can uncover a person’s real humanity.”33
Lee moves easily among wildly different genres and cultures. He has claimed he likes to return to his Chinese roots for “artistic rejuvenation.” Asked what the essence of his filmmaking was by Robert Hilferty Bloomberg, interviewing him in the China Post in 2005 after the successful release of Brokeback Mountain, Lee replied:
Repression, the struggle between how you want to behave as a social animal and the desire to be honest with your free will. That’s an important subtext in life, and a struggle for me. I also mistrust everything. Things you believe in can change just like that; that’s the essence of life. … My point of view is a bit Taoist. When things change, you have to adapt to it. That’s been our fate. My next film will be Chinese.34
Indeed, Lee’s next film took the ideas of repression/performance and love versus devotion to duty to a new intensity through the life-and-death struggle of the heroine between her heart and her cause in Lust/Caution. Taking Woodstock again dealt with the themes of repression and liberation, while Life of Pi further integrated these ideas and showed the balance achieved by adapting to and accepting one’s fate, each reflecting Lee’s continuing exploration of these subjects.
James Schamus
A study of Ang Lee would not be complete without a discussion of American independent film producer James Schamus, who has collaborated with Lee on all of his feature films except Life of Pi. In addition to cofounding and serving for twelve years as CEO of Focus Features, the art-house film division of Universal Studios, Schamus is also a professor of film theory, history, and criticism at Columbia University, and a published film historian. He first noticed Lee after seeing his NYU graduate thesis film, A Fine Line, and began a collaboration that has been notable both for its success and its longevity. To briefly outline Schamus’ most remarkable contributions, he produced Brokeback Mountain, cowrote Hulk, and cowrote and executive-produced Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He produced The Ice Storm, which he also adapted from Rick Moody’s novel. He produced and wrote Ride with the Devil, coproduced Sense and Sensibility, and cowrote and associate-produced Eat Drink Man Woman. He produced and cowrote The Wedding Banquet and produced Lee’s first feature, Pushing Hands, for which he also served as an uncredited writer. (Interestingly, his voice is also used in an uncredited cameo; he is the literary agent who leaves an enthusiastic answering machine message about Martha’s book.)
Aside from his collaborations with Lee, Schamus has worked with other independent filmmakers such as Todd Haynes (Safe, 1995), Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, 1996), and Todd Solondz (Happiness, 1998). Schamus’ original Good Machine production company, which he founded with Ted Hope, produced fiercely defiant films in the early 1990s. Schamus has said, “To be part of the American independent scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s meant that you were defined by, in many ways, your relationship to the early days of queer cinema, which was really the most challenging and the most defining part of that cultural moment.”35 Aside from his early work with Solondz, Holofcener, and Haynes, Schamus’ most enduring cinematic relationship has definitely been with Ang Lee.
Lee elaborates on his relationship with James Schamus:
I brought my first project to him seeking out his help as a producer and the rest fell into place afterward. And on The Wedding Banquet he helped me with rewrites and expanding the English portion of the screenplay, especially the first and last quarter of the film regarding the development of Simon’s character. Eat Drink Man Woman was entirely in Chinese, but he helped me in revising and rewriting the script. When we began work on Sense and Sensibility, I brought him along because I didn’t know anybody in England, and he became the producer. Back then, I felt very insecure about the white world, and James was a very liberal and knowledgeable person—and a very hip person. He is really like a walking dictionary. He could help me with everything, from public speaking to writing letters, checking out facts, and selling films. He always gave me all kinds of advice, telling me that I’d be doomed if I did this, or it would be great if I did that. So I developed the habit of checking with him on all kinds of fronts. … Gradually James extended his services to write almost all of my screenplays from The Ice Storm on. I never treat him quite like a writer, but he provides me with the kinds of textures that I need. I have tried working with different writers, but it always seems very difficult. It is hard for them to understand me and really know what I need, and provide me with what I am looking for. James seems to be the closest.36
It is clear from Schamus’ work on screenplays that he is an extraordinary writer. His solo adaptation of The Ice Storm garnered him the Best Screenplay prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Despite speaking no Mandarin, he also took on the challenging role of working with Chinese cowriters for Lee’s early trilogy films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Lust/Caution. For Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Music (Song) for composing lyrics to the title song, “A Love Before Time,” and Best Adapted Screenplay (along with his cowriters). The importance of Schamus’ contributions to both the writing and the shaping of the screenplays cannot be overstated, for it was Schamus who brought New York sensibilities to the American characters in Lee’s two earliest screenplays, as well as grim 1970s realism to the screenplay for The Ice Storm (like the adolescents in the film, Schamus grew up in the 1970s). His screenplay for Ride with the Devil is simply gorgeous English prose. It is also clear that Schamus was largely responsible for making the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger not only comprehensible but palatable to a Western audience. The same is true of Eat Drink Man Woman, for which Schamus not only suggested key plot points but which he shaped for Western tastes, accounting for its phenomenal international success.
In addition to the writing credits, Schamus must be recognized for the ingenious marketing of Lee’s films, from the very earliest days, when fortune cookies were handed out in movie-house foyers as a promotion for The Wedding Banquet, to the limited and staggered release of Brokeback Mountain (first, to strategically-selected cities and later, after successful word-of-mouth advertising, to the American heartland). In addition to the almost surgical precision used in the targeting of cities and venues for Brokeback Mountain’s initial run (an understanding of New York’s microclimates helped Schamus immensely), another strategy used in marketing Brokeback Mountain was to sell it as a romance for women rather than a controversial gay-bashing tale. (Focus Features also marketed the film to the gay community, with press junkets to gay venues and articles in gay magazines like Out.) Schamus demonstrated remarkably strategic expertise in writing articles and editorials for New York newspapers and magazines to stir up interest in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk, and Brokeback Mountain. He has served as official apologist for the films, writing lengthy public treatises to defend them; no doubt his skill with public debate is aided by his academic background. For example, Schamus publicly addressed accusations that the marketing strategy for Brokeback Mountain had made a conscious effort to “de-gay” and play up the heterosexual aspects of the movie. In the New York Review of Books, Schamus responded to this claim:
Daniel Mendelsohn, in his finely observed review of Brokeback Mountain [“An Affair to Remember,” NYRB, February 23], sets up a false dichotomy between the essentially “gay” nature of the film and the erasure of this gay identity through the marketing and reception of the film as a “universal” love story. … Mendelsohn is rightly nervous about what happens when a gay text is so widely and enthusiastically embraced by a mainstream hetero-dominated culture; and it is true that many reviewers contextualize their investment in the gay aspects of the romance by claiming that the characters’ homosexuality is incidental to the film’s achievements. … To begin with, there is a very real sense in which the film is, or at least aspires to be, “universal” in just the way Mendelsohn describes it, as a “distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it.” One thing this means is that we solicit every audience member’s identification with the film’s central gay characters; the film succeeds if it, albeit initially within the realm of the aesthetic, queers its audience. But in doing so, it paradoxically figures its gayness not just as a concretely situated identity, but also as a profound and emotionally expansive experience, understandable by all.37
One of the most striking characteristics of James Schamus is his willingness to give the limelight to Ang Lee, whose name is the far better known of the two. James Schamus has stood behind Lee and supported him from the early days, when Lee was just another risky proposition as an independent filmmaker, and has played a critical role in helping to fashion Lee’s reception in the international arena.38
Miscellaneous Projects of Ang Lee
In 1995, the same year he made Sense and Sensibility, Lee cowrote and coproduced a movie called Siao Yu (Shaonü xiaoyu). For this film, he collaborated with the influential Taiwanese film star Sylvia Chang (who had appeared as Jin-Rong, the father’s love interest and mother to Shan-Shan in Eat Drink Man Woman). He and Sylvia Chang worked together on the screenplay, based on a novel by Geling Yan. The story contained some of the East/West elements Ang Lee was already known for from The Wedding Banquet and Pushing Hands. A poor Chinese girl, Siao Yu (Rene Liu), working in a New York sweatshop, needs a Green Card to stay in the United States. She and her boyfriend (an illegal Chinese immigrant) make a deal with an elderly American man, Mario Moretti (Daniel J. Travanti), a former political activist and writer who, aging into his sixties, urgently needs some money to pay off a gambling debt. Her boyfriend borrows some money from his friends to pay the old man so he and Siao Yu can fake a marriage as husband and wife. While Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents check on them repeatedly to make sure it is a legitimate marriage, the story takes some moving turns before the Green Card is finally granted. Rene Liu, whose prodigious talents as a young actress were showcased for the first time in this film, has become a well-known actress in both China and Taiwan. Siao Yu is one of her earliest movies.
This film shows some of the familiar themes of other Ang Lee films, including the East/West dialectic, the deceit to keep peace which leads to chaotic comedy—with Rita (Marj Dusay), Mario’s first wife, arriving suddenly in his apartment—a focus on the harmonizing influence of food, and the touching scene with a sweatshop worker singing along with an old Chinese song on the radio about how her life could have been different. There are light jokes about language, as Mario gently chides Siao Yu over her habit of saying “I’m sorry” all the time. As they gaze at the moon on an evening walk, Mario tells her, “Don’t say you’re sorry.” It also has a quiet ending, with Siao Yu in tears, having made an important decision that will change her life.
In 2001, Ang Lee shot The Hire: Chosen, a short film for the automobile manufacturer BMW. BMW had asked a series of directors (including John Woo, John Frankenheimer, Ridley Scott, and Alejandro González Iñárritu) to make promotional films in their distinctive styles. Clive Owen plays the Driver, and Lee’s son, Mason, appears in the film as a passenger. The film is six-and-a-half minutes long and was formerly available on the manufacturer’s website. The plot is as follows: The Driver collects a Tibetan child who has just arrived in America on a ship. He must drive him through a dark night in the city to get to a monk’s house, while eluding several would-be kidnappers driving American cars. Because of the BMW’s superior maneuverability, they are able to evade the kidnappers. At the end of the film, Clive Owen sticks a bandage on his ear, and on the bandage is the image of “the Hulk,” an inside reference to Lee’s future release in 2003. This inside joke was prescient as this film was also made at the level that could be enjoyable for both adults and children.
Finally, Lee is the first Taiwanese screenwriter to have one of his films rewritten in English and produced as a Hollywood movie. Tortilla Soup (2001), the American remake of Eat Drink Man Woman, was directed by María Ripoll and released in 2001. Using the basic plot of Eat Drink Man Woman, this film recast the story in Hispanic/American culture, with Hector Elizondo as the father of three rebellious daughters who share their love through food. As in Lee’s film, the plot turned on the device of the father losing his sense of taste. This is an unprecedented case of a Taiwanese film remade outside the island.
In 2003, Lee was credited as executive producer for the film One Last Ride, about a man’s descent into gambling addiction. This endeavor reunited him with actor Pat Cupo, who had starred in his award-winning graduate thesis film A Fine Line in 1984.
While still in the planning stages, Lee has announced that he will executive produce a film directed by Yuen Wo Ping, the action choreographer for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for future release. The film, entitled The Hands of Shang-Chi, is based on the Marvel Comics kung fu hero who learns that his father is the world’s worst criminal.
In addition, it has been announced that Lee is to follow up his Academy Award–winning Life of Pi with a very different kind of 3D film, this time focusing on the legendary boxers of the 1960s and 1970s. Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali’s classic 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” fight will be one of the movie’s climactic centerpieces, with Lee hoping to advance visual special-effects techniques into new territory—the 3D depiction of some of the greatest fights in boxing history. There are few further details available, but the screenplay is by a highly-celebrated screenwriter, Britain’s two-time Academy Award–nominee Peter Morgan, nominated for both The Queen (2006) and Frost/Nixon (2008).
While it surprised some U.S. viewers that Lee beat Steven Spielberg (Lincoln, 2012) in the best director category at the 2013 Academy Awards ceremony, Life of Pi was unquestionably one of the most well-received award-winners with global audiences, having claimed a hugely impressive US$609 million in worldwide box office sales. With this new film, Lee’s decision to venture further into visual special-effects comes at a time when 3D revenues are falling in the U.S., the world’s largest box office, though the medium remains popular elsewhere around the globe.
Ang Lee: In the Midst of the Tide
Ang Lee has said in interviews that he feels he in some ways embodies the rapidly deepening relationship between American and Asian cinema, and that Hollywood has been a few years behind the curve. “I’m in the midst of this tide,” he has said.39 From making small international films like The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, to making “quality English movies” like Sense and Sensibility, and finally to becoming accepted as a mainstream Hollywood director, with Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi, Lee’s career has been a pioneering experience. “By the time I made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, everything seems to have come together. … On the receiving side, I think the whole world is more ready, with the Internet, with film festivals and DVDs. It used to be a one way street from West to East: we were receiving and the West was producing. I think we’re getting closer and closer. The gap between the cultures is getting erased every day. … The world’s getting smaller.”40 Lee’s films, from his earliest Chinese-language trilogy to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life of Pi, not only anticipated but also facilitated current trends in globalization and cultural exchange that are becoming an increasingly common part of the twenty-first century worldview.