"The Ice Storm" scrutinizes a suburban family's travails at the height of the 1970s in upper-middle-class Connecticut. Given the film's intense exploration of the period and the locale, it comes as a surprise that this poignantly accurate piece was directed by...
[more]"The Ice Storm" scrutinizes a suburban family's travails at the height of the 1970s in upper-middle-class Connecticut. Given the film's intense exploration of the period and the locale, it comes as a surprise that this poignantly accurate piece was directed by a native of Taiwan who only arrived in the United States in 1978. After all, Lee admits, he barely knew what rock 'n' roll was, much less disco.
In directing the American film, Lee faced basic problems. Like how to imagine parents whose defiant kids won't go to sleep when they're told. (Apparently, no Chinese child would ever get away with such rebellion.) And at one point during film, he placed a field hockey stick in one of the boy's rooms -- one of his assistants shyly approached him, informing him that in America the sport was primarily played by females.
One might imagine that Lee simply didn't have access to certain deeper psychological nuances in the story, since emotional responses are inevitably colored by cultural specificity. However, in collaboration with scriptwriter James Schamus, Lee was able not just to fill in these gaps but to plumb them. Turning his cultural disadvantage into an advantage, he created a sharply constructed and visually breathtaking film. With an ice storm as the basic metaphorical device, the film is at once brooding and poetic, pulled taut by a quiet tension.
Lee is attracted to period pieces. In 1995, he directed "Sense and Sensibility," portraying a world as distant from the American '70s as one could possibly get (but no closer to Taiwan, however). "In 'Sense and Sensibility' the social code wants you to be rational and good, and the characters want to be bad," Lee explains. "In 'The Ice Storm' the social code wants you to be bad, and actually they're not so bad after all -- they still want to be good!" Regardless of these dichotomies, both films are preoccupied with similar concerns: namely, how people negotiate the tensions between social demands and emotional needs -- a telling theme for Lee, who has negotiated his own tensions by working between two cultures.
Lee also explores the traditional versus the modern, a theme upon which many
of the Chinese New Wave directors focus. His 1993 film "The Wedding Banquet" is a farcical take on the life of a Chinese gay man living with his white lover in New York City. Caught between his own desire and the strict codes of his parents (who pop in for a surprise visit), the protagonist is forced to walk a fine line between the opposing forces of the ancient and the contemporary. Here again is tension, working itself out in another form.
Lee's other films include "Eat Drink Man Woman" and "Pushing Hands." He has won Berlin's Golden Bear twice, and he has been a regular at the Academy Awards since "Banquet" was first nominated for best foreign film -- "Sense and Sensibility" garnered seven nominations. He is currently working on a new film, another collaboration with Schamus entitled "To Live On."
[show less]
