1 of 2
Made in Taiwan, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the top-grossing subtitled film ever, is the first Chinese drama to cross over into North American theaters and become a bona-fide mainstream hit, garnering ten Academy Award nominations and winning four (Best Foreign Film, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score). Perhaps not coincidentally, three of the four major characters in this genre-bending action-drama are women: strong characters who carry both the plot and the action.
Lee, who also directed The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility in the West, first made his mark in Taiwan with the wildly entertaining family comedy, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. In this masterful romp, Mr. Chu is a widowed chef whose three beautiful daughters are victims—and beneficiaries—of the rapid changes in Chinese culture. A generation earlier Mr. Chu would have married the girls off, probably at great cost. Now, one is a successful airline executive, another is a teacher, and the youngest a struggling waitress.
Mr. Chu is a gruff old duffer who loves his daughters even as he drives them crazy. When he falls in love with a younger woman, he is drawn to her partly becuase of his grandfatherly relationship with her little daughter, Shan-Shan. In one of the film's subplots, we see Chu, the great chef, trundling exotic lunches to the primary school for Shan-Shan, whose divorced mother is a wretched cook. Soon Shan-Shan is taking orders for the entire class, and Chu is happily (and secretly) feeding them.
What is remarkable about Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is Lee's deft parsing of subtle contradictions in Chinese culture. For centuries, China's girls and women have been undervalued. In the communist era, the one-child policy has encouraged infanticide and selective abortion of females, creating a staggering gender imbalance. Yet the role of women in China has always been more complex than that of passive victim, and the best recent Chinese films—Lee's among them—feature strong female protagonists, girls and women of great strength, resourcefulness, and courage.
Some of these strong women are cast in hopeless situations. Zhang Yimou is the acknowledged master of the current Chinese cinema, and his collaborations with the electrifying Gong Li stand among the finest films of our time, visually stunning and almost Shakespearean in conception. In Ju Dou, Gong Li plays the young wife of a cruel elderly mill owner. When the film was made, a decade ago, China's gerontocracy saw it as a veiled attack on their rule, and Ju Dou was subsequently banned. In Raise the Red Lantern, Gong is a university student whose father has died and left her penniless. She reluctantly becomes the fourth wife of a rich man, who plays his wives against one another in a cruel game of manipulation. The master holds all the power. The women, unable to strike a blow against their oppressor, are reduced to fighting among themselves. We never see the master's face, except in shadow. Once again, China's aging communist rulers saw a reflection of themselves and banned the film.
Zhang's most recent international release, Not One Less (1999), again features a strong female protagonist, but this time the scenario offers a bit of hope. Not One Less is Zhang's most visually simple film, and the actors—most of them children—are largely untrained. When an impoverished rural school needs a substitute teacher for a month, no one with any education is willing to take the job. The one-room school is a ramshackle affair, with fewer amenities than a modern American henhouse. The students sit on rough plank benches. Finally a substitute is found: 13-year-old Wei Minzhi. Barely older than some of her students and prone to pouting, she seems more like an inept babysitter than a teacher.
share this page
RSS Feed
