Feminéma’s eccentric Oscar ballot; or, not putting money where my mouth is

Every year I lose in Oscar-night ballot-offs with my friends. Good thing I don’t bet actual money. You see, I insist on voting with my heart. To wit: last year I voted for Demián Bichir for Best Actor, in part because it suited the We Are the 99%/ Have-Nots vs. Haves mood I was in.

Do my choices amount to mere whimsy? Not at all, particularly considering the context. On schedule, the Academy disappointed us with its lists of nominees — overlooking terrific films, shutting Kathryn Bigelow out of competition for Best Director. Moreover, we all know from those “for your consideration” ads that the studios are pushing hard for their own films to get votes…because, yes, lobbying helps win votes. Moreover, the voting at this stage always entails voting against certain films almost as much as it’s a positive process. In sum, presented with a deeply problematic selection/ voting process, my methods of choosing What Should Win at Sunday’s Oscar Awards Ceremony are better than most. 

Shall we?

Best Actor(s) in which I opt for emotion over restraint (and the long shots over the bookies) by rooting for Emmanuelle Riva and Joaquin Phoenix. 

The odds-makers tell us these two don’t have a chance. Nor do I have a beef with the likely winners; of course Daniel Day-Lewis was great, and you know how much I love Jennifer Lawrence.

But Riva and Phoenix did things in these roles that I can’t shake from my mind. They took risks they’ve never taken before; I still have memories of the naked, helpless Anne (Riva) being washed by a home health care worker and crying out (“it hurts! it hurts!”); and the emaciated, twisted Freddie (Phoenix) happily pouring various toxins and photographic chemicals into a cocktail shaker for yet one more night of blankness. These are the actors who should win.

Best Supporting Actor(s) in which I give Lincoln its due and root for Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field. 

These are dicey categories for me, as I haven’t seen some of the most relevant films (Django Unchained; The Sessions; Les Misérables). And yet I have opinions anyway!

No one with Jones’ accent has any right playing a senator from Pennsylvania, but he was so good here. And oh, Sally Field walked that fine line between despair and self-consciousness so beautifully. 

I haven’t written about the film here. My overall take on it is that it was a beautifully acted and written piece that was marred by ham-handed directing at the beginning and end — I’m sorry, folks, but Spielberg needs to step back from the swelling violins moments. Anyway, speaking of directing ….

Best Picture and Best Director in which I abandon all betting wisdom and root for Zero Dark Thirty and Michael Haneke. 

In two years we’ll look back and see the hubbub that shut Zero Dark Thirty out of serious competition and wonder what the hell people were thinking. In two years we’ll catch Argo getting recycled again on one of those cable channels and think, “Okay, it is a great story, but I can’t believe Hollywood was so utterly fucked that this film won a Best Picture Oscar.”

Hence I’m voting for Haneke for Best Director, as that was the second best film of the year.

Best Editing and Cinematography in which I maintain that the Academy doesn’t know what these categories really mean, and vote for Silver Linings Playbook and nothing at all for Cinematography.

It’s the editing that made Silver Linings Playbook such a terrifically crackling comedy — I’d go so far as to argue that it’s the editing that stands out the most to me in making this so watchable. I just don’t even see there being any serious competition here, even as I have lavished so much praise on clunkier editing jobs in Zero Dark Thirty and other films.

And on Cinematography: you know what’s likeliest to win? Life of Pi! 90% of which was filmed before a green screen so that special effects could be inserted later!

Now, I understand that such filming can also be exquisite; and indeed, this was a beautiful film to watch. But I’m so exasperated that the eloquent filmmaking of Amour wasn’t nominated (and in that apartment!) as well as Beasts of the Southern Wild that I just want to spit.

Best Screenplay(s) in which I root for some underdogs: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Moonrise Kingdom.

I’ll admit it: I’m rooting for Beasts simply because it’s one of the few times a woman was recognized in this year’s Oscar ballot beyond the acting categories. Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin might not have written the best script in the bunch — that might have to be Tony Kushner’s Lincoln — but I’m sticking with my choice for political reasons anyway.

And Moonrise Kingdom. It was just so weird and creative and delightful; just thinking about it makes me want to see it again right now. Lovely.

And finally: Best Animated Feature and Best Foreign Film: the only categories in which my choices have a pretty good chance of succeeding with Brave and Amour.

Let’s just summarize this by saying, I can’t be wrong all the time. I’d be through the roof if Brave pulls this off.

A few closing choices:

Short Film/Animated: please let it be Head Over Heels, the one true independent in the bunch (and a really great, creative short); see it here!

Costume Design: the one way I want Snow White and the Huntsman to be remembered.

Original Score: the one way I want Argo to be remembered. (Or, rather, the king-ification of composer Alexandre Desplat.)

We’ll see whether I can catch up on the other short films (live action, documentary short subject) by the end of the afternoon via some creative web searches. And I’ll see you all at the red carpet tonight — during which you can laugh hilariously at my near-complete shutout.

Can we also collectively hold our breaths that emcee Seth MacFarlane isn’t as misogynistic, racist, and otherwise offensive in person as he is as a filmmaker, and/or that better human beings wrote the show? yeah, maybe not.

No Oscar nomination for Kathryn Bigelow

The Academy released its Oscar nominations this morning, and they did not include a nomination for Kathryn Bigelow’s directing of the film Zero Dark Thirty, which stars Jessica Chastain.

Bigelow and the film have already won big in other competitions. The film has won 6 Best Film prizes, and Bigelow has won 4 Best Director awards. This outpaces Steven Spielberg’s achievements thus far for Lincoln, which has received two Best Film prizes and zero Best Director prizes. All three times these two directors went head to head in a competition — the Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards, the Satellite Awards, and the Washington, DC Film Critics Association Awards — Bigelow won.

Let me ask the obvious: why does the Academy select up to ten films for its Best Picture category (including Zero Dark Thirty) but only five for Best Director? In the last several years the dividend between those two categories has inevitably seen female directors ignored. I liked The Life of Pi and Silver Linings Playbook a lot. But these films do not rise to the mastery of Bigelow’s work, nor to its cultural importance more broadly.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Academy Awards are the biggest, most visible prizes to be earned in film in the US. Too bad they reflect an old boys’ network looking out for their own.

Pitch: “A Touch of Zen” (1971) could use a remake

About a week before Ocean’s Eleven (2001) came out, I saw the original with Frank Sinatra et als (1960). It was terrible. All the more reason to love the Steven Soderbergh version. He took the bare bones of the original but did some pretty serious rewriting and major character development to give us style, humor, better actors, and a better ending.

Just think what you could do with a film like King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, which is already pretty good. It’s just too long and has some other issues as I’ll detail below. As I occasionally like to offer up my own brilliant plot ideas for an eager reading audience, here’s my advice to Hollywood: tweak this story and you’ve got box office gold!

The original story centers on Ku (Shih Jun), a mild-mannered, unambitious scholar in a small village who refuses to follow his mother’s advice and apply for a better-paid job in the magistrate’s office. One day he encounters two strangers: first, he’s commissioned to paint a portrait of a sinister-looking man named Ouyang (Tien Peng); and second, that night he hears strange noises coming from the abandoned and reputedly haunted house across the way. When he investigates, he’s spooked by a strange and ghostly figure who later proves to be Miss Yang (Hsu Feng, above), a laconic, unsmiling, beautiful woman on the run from a corrupt official who wants to execute her and has hired Ouyang to do it. Ku teams up with her to help (as much as a clumsy scholar can), and the remainder of the film traces their attempts to escape. It culminates with a terrific battle scene in a bamboo forest with some kickass Buddhist monks, which shows this film’s influences on later wuxia greats like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

The dvd copy I got, a simple VHS-to-DVD transfer, shows the film’s abundant wear & tear — all those night scenes are almost too muddy to see, and you often see scratches or grit on the film itself. At just over 3 hours it’s long and seems to end 3 different times. Still, this tale has great characters, terrific fight scenes (including one in a bamboo forest that has huge potential for re-imagining, and not just in a Crouching Tiger imitation way), and — best of all — a ghost-story subtheme.

Nor does it need to be set during the typical wuxia never-never land of an unspecified past of swordsmen and secretive martial arts sects. In fact, I can imagine a great modern version taking place amongst Chinese Americans of a 1940s San Francisco or perhaps one of its agricultural regions nearby, like Watsonville or Gilroy, during the same era that saw the internment of Japanese Americans. Can’t you just imagine the final fight scene taking place in a redwood forest or a eucalyptus grove, or perhaps on the oceanside cliffs south of Monterey? (Hollywood: call me and we’ll talk. My screenwriting and/or consulting rates are shockingly affordable.)

No matter the setting, the first order of business is to switch up the protagonist. In the original, our hero(?) is Ku, the bumbling scholar — but although we need to start with him, once we meet Miss Yang she needs to supplant him as protagonist. (I mean, even us bumbling scholars don’t really like to see ourselves as protagonists.) Ku pales in comparison. He reminds me of that creepy dude in my college dorm, the one who always seemed to leer at you from his doorway. Miss Yang could also use more of a back story, as well as clearer motivations to explain, for one, why in the world she has sex with Ku, with his creepy toothiness and weird makeup. (The Feminéma rewrite might have to find a more Chow Yun Fat-style sexual partner for Yang. Mmmmm.)

Second: don’t drop the creepy haunted-house subtheme midway through the film. The film’s first half takes place on the best set ever: a lonely, run-down village, at the center of which is a hauntingly memorable abandoned home and compound that used to belong to a military general. What a set it makes. The white plumes of the tall, ghostlike pampas grass constantly block your view of what’s going on. Spiderwebs everywhere — fabulous! It provides the setting for one of the film’s best big fight scenes, during which our heroes scare the bad guys by making them think real ghosts are attacking them on all sides. Afterward, however, we leave the haunted house and don’t return.

I say you can bring it back in with the Super-Dooper mystical Buddhist monks, who make a couple of handy appearances in the film’s second half. No matter how this story gets rewritten, the monks stay in.

Best of all, just imagine the possibilities if our sword-carrying heroine and her monk friends are not just battling corruption (Californians trying to grab Chinese-American land and business as well as those belonging to Japanese Americans, possibly?) but also World War II, nativism, and 1940s sexism. It could be a cross between blaxploitation and wuxia — with just enough historical and place-specific context to make it interesting.

Hollywood, remember how much money Crouching Tiger made? It ranked as the 19th most profitable film worldwide of 2000 and raked 44 film prizes from 14 different awards-granting institutions.

Now, finally: a title. A Touch of Zen might sound a bit too tame for the action I foresee.

• Zen and the Art of Surviving a War?
• Zenifornia? 
• Mod Zen Explosion?

Listmania: The very best of period drama. (It’s not just for girls.)

You’ll see right away that this is not all BBC and Jane Austen. Once I started constructing this list, I realized that there’s no material difference between The Godfather, Parts I and II and The Forsyte Saga. They’re usually literary adaptations (which range from cynical to gritty to romantic to eminently silly). They almost always tell intense, character-driven tales of families or communities to throw the reader into a moment in the past — not just for history geeks or people with weird corset fetishes. Period drama ultimately addresses issues of love and power, adventures and domestic lives, self-understanding and self-delusion, and the institutions or cultural expectations of the past that condition people’s lives. Class boundaries, sexism, political institutions, and (less often) race — seeing those things at work in the past helps illuminate their work in our own time.

Most of all, it makes no sense that period dramas are so strongly associated with “women’s” viewing. Okay, it does make sense: PBS is dribbling Downton Abbey to us every Sunday, and my female Facebook friends twitter delightedly afterward. But that’s just because all those dudes refuse to admit that Deadwood is a costume drama, too. This is a working draft, so please tell me what I’ve missed — or argue with me. I love arguments and recommendations.

1. American Graffiti (1973), which isn’t a literary adaptation but was probably the first film that wove together pop songs with the leisurely yearning of high school kids into something that feels literary. Who knew George Lucas could write dialogue like this? An amazing document about one night in the early 60s that Roger Ebert calls “not only a great movie but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.”
2. Cold Comfort Farm (1995), which functions for me as true comfort on a regular basis. This supremely silly film, based on the Stella Gibbons novel and directed by John Schlesinger, tells of a young society girl (Kate Beckinsale) in the 1920s who arrives at her cousins’ miserably awful farm and sets to work tidying things up. I can’t even speak about the total wonderfulness of how she solves the problem of her oversexed cousin Seth (Rufus Sewell); suffice it to say that this film only gets better on frequent re-viewings. (Right, Nan F.?)
3. Days of Heaven (1973), the lyrical film by Terrence Malick about migrant farm workers in the 1910s and narrated by the froggy-voiced, New York-accented, cynical and tiny teenager Linda Manz. Beautiful and elegant, and one of my favorite films ever — and a lesson about how a simple, familiar, even clichéd story can be enough to shape a film and still permit viewers to be surprised. (The scene with the locusts rests right up there as a great horror scene in film history, if you ask me.)
4. Deadwood (2004-06), the great HBO series about Deadwood, South Dakota in its very earliest days of existence — a place with no law, only raw power. Fantastic: and David Milch’s Shakespearean dialogue somehow renders that world ever more weird and awful. Excessively dude-heavy, yes; but hey, by all accounts that was accurate for the American West in the 1860s. And let’s not forget about Trixie.
5. The Forsyte Saga (2002-03), the Granada/ITV series based on the John Galsworthy novel which I wrote about with love here. Those turn-of-the-century clothes! The miseries of marriage! The lustful glances while in the ballroom! The many, many episodes! 
6. The Godfather Parts I and II (1972, 1974). I still think Al Pacino’s work in these films is just extraordinary, considering what a newbie he was to film acting; and the street scenes with Robert De Niro from turn-of-the-century New York in Part II! spectacular! Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the Mario Puzo novel, of course, with political intrigues and family in-fighting that matches anything the 19th-century novel could possibly produce.
7. Jane Eyre (2011), again, a film I’ve raved about numerous times. I’ve got piles of reasons to believe this is the best version ever, so don’t even try to fight it. ‘Nuff said.
8. L.A. Confidential (1997), a film by Curtis Hanson I’ve only given glancing attention to considering how much I love it. At some point I’ve got to fix this. It won’t pass the Bechdel Test, but by all accounts the sprawling James Ellroy novel about postwar Los Angeles was far more offending in that regard; and despite all that, Kim Basinger’s terrific role as the elusive Veronica Lake lookalike is always the first person I think of when looking back on it. She lashes into Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) mercilessly, and he wants her all the more. Of course.
9. Little Dorrit (2008), which saved me from one of the worst semesters of my life — shortly to be followed by two more terrible semesters. This was a magic tonic at just the right time. Charles Dickens at his twisting, turning best; and screenwriter Andrew Davies doing what he does best in taking a long novel and transforming it for a joint BBC/PBS production. Oodles of episodes, all of which are awesome.
10. Lust, Caution (2007), which I only saw this month. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a sensual, dangerous, beautifully-acted period film. And that Tang Wei! I’m still marveling over her performance. Ang Lee directed this WWII resistance thriller, based on a novel by Eileen Chang.
11. Mad Men (2007-present). It’s been a while since Season 4, which I loved; they tell me the long-awaited fifth season is coming back to AMC this March. Oh Peggy, oh Joan, oh Betty, and little Sally Draper…whither goes the women in Season 5? I’m not sure there’s a modern director amongst us who cares so much for both the historical minutiae (a woman’s watch, the design of a clock on the wall) and the feeling of the early- to mid-60s as Matthew Weiner.
12. Marie Antoinette (2006), surely the most controversial choice on this list. Director Sofia Coppola creates a mood film about a young woman plopped into a lonely, miserable world of luxury and excess. The back of the film throbs with the quasi-dark, quasi-pop rhythms of 80s music — such an unexpected pairing, and one that really just worked. Kirsten Dunst’s characteristic openness of face, together with her slight wickedness, made her the perfect star.
13. Middlemarch (1994). Can you believe how many of these films & series I’ve already written about? Juliet Aubrey, Patrick Malahide, Rufus Sewell et als. just bring it with this adaptation of George Eliot’s sprawling (and best) novel. Marriage never looked so foolish, except until Galsworthy wrote The Forsyte Saga. It’s yet another BBC production and yet another terrific screenplay by Andrew Davies.
14. My Brilliant Career (1979), the film that initated me into costume drama love, and which gave me a lasting affection for Australians. Judy Davis, with those freckles and that unmanageable hair, was such a model for me as a kid that I think of her as one of my favorite actresses. Directed by the great Gillian Armstrong and based on the novel by Miles Franklin about the early 20th century outback, this still stands up — and it makes me cry a little to think that Davis has gotten such a relatively small amount of attention in the US over the years.
    
15. North and South (2004). The piece I wrote on this brilliant BBC series is very much for the already-initiated; at some point soon I’m going to write about how many times I’ve shown this little-known series to my friends practically as a form of evangelism. “The industrial revolution has never been so sexy,” I was told when I first watched it. You’ll never forget the scenes of the 1850s cotton mill and the workers’ tenements; and your romantic feelings about trains will forever been confirmed.
16. Our Mutual Friend (1998), which I absorbed in an unholy moment of costume-drama overload while on an overseas research trip. You’ll never look at actor Stephen Mackintosh again without a little pang of longing for his plain, unadorned face and quiet pining. Another crazy mishmash of Dickensian characters, creatively named and weirdly motivated by the BBC by screenwriter Sandy Welch for our viewing pleasure.
17. The Painted Veil (2006). Now, the writer Somerset Maugham usually only had one trick up his sleeve; he loved poetic justice with only the slightest twist of agony. Maugham fans won’t get a lot of surprises in this John Curran film, but this adaptation set in 1930s China is just beautifully rendered, and features spectacular images from the mountain region of Guanxi Province. It also features terrific performances by Naomi Watts, Liev Shreiber (slurp!), and especially Edward Norton, who’s just stunningly good. 
18. The Piano (1993), written and directed by the superlative Jane Campion about a mute woman (Holly Hunter) and her small daughter (Anna Paquin) arriving at the home of her new husband, a lonely 1850s New Zealand frontiersman (Harvey Keitel) who has essentially purchased them from the woman’s father. As with Lust, Caution you’d be surprised how sexy sex in past decades can be. And the music!
19. Pride and Prejudice (1995). Is it a cliché to include this? Or would it be wrong to snub the costume drama to end all costume drama? Considering this series logged in at a full 6 hours, it’s impressive I’ve watched it as many times as I have. Jennifer Ehle, Colin Firth, and a cracklingly faithful script by Andrew Davies — now this is what one needs on a grim winter weekend if one is saddles with the sniffles.
20. The Remains of the Day (1993). I still think the Kazuo Ishiguro novel is one of his best, almost as breathtaking as An Artist of the Floating World (why hasn’t that great novel been made into a film, by the way?). This adaptation by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory gets the social stultification of prewar Britain and the class system absolutely. Antony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala script!
21. A Room With a View (1985), which I include for sentimental reasons — because I saw it at that precise moment in my teens when I was utterly and completely swept away by the late 19th century romance. In retrospect, even though that final makeout scene in the Florentine window still gets my engines runnin’, I’m more impressed by the whole Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala production of the E. M. Forster novel — its humor, the dialogue, the amazing cast. Maggie Smith and Daniel Day Lewis alone are enough to steal the show.
22. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996). This novel runs a pretty close second to Jane Eyre in my list of favorite Brontë Sisters Power Novels (FYI: Villette comes next) due to the absolute fury Anne Brontë directed at the institution of marriage. And this BBC series, featuring Tara Fitzgerald, Toby Stephens, and the darkest of all dark villains Rupert Graves, is gorgeous and stark. I haven’t seen much of Fitzgerald lately, but this series makes you love her outspoken sharpness.
23. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), Tomas Alfredson’s terrific condensation of a labyrinthine John Le Carré novel into a 2-hour film. Whereas the earlier version — a terrific 7-part miniseries featuring the incomparable Alec Guinness as Smiley — was made shortly after the book’s publication, Alfredson’s version reads as a grim period drama of the 1970s. I dare you to imagine a more bleak set of institutional interiors than those inhabited by The Circus.
24. True Grit (2010), the Coen Brothers’ very funny, wordy retelling of the Charles Portis novel that has the most pleasurable dialogue of any film in my recent imagination. The rapid-fire legalities that 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) fires during the film’s earliest scenes; the banter between Ross, Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), and La Boeuf (Matt Damon) as they sit around campfires or leisurely make their way across hardscrabble landscapes — now, that’s a 19th century I like imagining.
25. A Very Long Engagement (2004), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sole historical film and one that combines his penchant for great gee-whiz stuff and physical humor with a full-hearted romanticism. Maybe not the most accurate portrayal of immediate period after WWI, but what a terrific world to fall into for a couple of hours. 

A few final notes: I’ve never seen a few classics, including I, Claudius; Brideshead Revisited; Upstairs/Downstairs; Maurice; and The Duchess of Duke Street. (They’re on my queue, I promise!)

I included Pride and Prejudice rather than Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility and I’m still not certain I’m comfortable without it. But secretly, I think I liked Lee’s Lust, Caution a little bit better.

There are no samurai films here, despite the fact that I’m on record for loving them. Why not? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because I have no grasp whatsoever of Japanese history, and the films I know and love seem to see history less as something to recapture than to exploit. I’m certain I’m wrong about that — tell me why.

I reluctantly left off 2009’s A Single Man because it’s just not as good a film as I would have liked, no matter how good Colin Firth was, and no matter how gorgeous those early ’60s Los Angeles homes.

That said, you need to tell me: what do you say?

“Lust, Caution” (2007): holy crap, Tang Wei

You’ll understand why I put Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution onto my very short list of Rainy Days Films — those films one saves up, like that chocolate bar your friend brought back from Belgium, for a day when you have a need for something exceptionally luscious. This film is a period drama lover’s delight: sensuous with 1940s textures and fabrics and chinas, rippled with sunlight and neons and 1940s incandescents. It is also almost pornographically sexy (it was even cut for many audiences, and released in the US with a NC-17 rating).

What I didn’t expect was that Tang Wei to blow my frontal lobe in the role of Wong Chia Chi, a Hong Kong university student and accidental actress who, with her fellow actors, forms a renegade unit to resist the wartime Japanese occupation of China. She’s fabulous.

In the earliest part of the film (set in 1938), we see most clearly how young and naïve she is — and I mean, like, teenager young. She’s shy and a bit wowed by her older friend’s cohort of student actors, especially the one really good-looking boy. Even when she gets recruited into their patriotic play, we’re not sure whether such a young thing will make it onstage. But something happens in that concluding moment in their play, as Chia Chi’s real emotions intersect with those of her character, and a real tear slips down her cheek. Even her co-star in the scene seems thrown by her talent. It’s as if we see an entirely new person — acting has released in Chia Chi a talent for doubled selfhood and performance that seems preternatural.

Thus, when they cook up a plan to act as a resistance group to combat Japanese presence in China, Chia Chi is their star. She masquerades as a wealthy importer’s wife in order to infiltrate the social circle and mahjong club of Mrs. Yee (Joan Chen), the wife of collaborationist Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). Chia Chi spends her days advising the ladies on finding tailors and decent restaurants, appearing far more cosmopolitan and far older than her true age, and — trickiest of all — chit-chatting expertly with wealthy wives whose radar is acute. She waits for an opportunity to flirt prettily with the elusive Yee, who appears only occasionally in his wife’s parlor.

In every way — her expressions, her physical gestures, her face, it’s like Chia Chi is a different woman. She shows no hesitation in her acting skills — even a certain impetuousness.

Yee, meanwhile, is a cypher. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is always so good — that tragic face, that slightly beaten-down appearance, those eyes that bespeak yearning and self-defeat (see especially his Happy Together [1997] and the luminescent In the Mood for Love [2000]); here his character is particularly hard and inscrutable. Chia Chi often feels like she’s wasting time; she’s certainly wasting all her friends’ money while she loses at mahjong to Yee’s wife. But eventually he notices her, finds small ways to get closer to her.

Her radical friends congratulate her for her accomplishment. Then they remind her that she doesn’t know the first thing about sex; in fact, only one of them does, and that’s because he has a weakness for prostitutes. Thus begins the least sexy deflowering and “sex education” in the history of film, all done in the name of a free China. But the Yees leave Hong Kong before she gets her chance to seduce him. Their assassination plans foiled, Chia Chi and her friends have a particularly bad night before they break apart and don’t see each other again.

Three years later, Chia Chi is staying with an aunt in Shanghai, poor and going through the motions of her studies. Like other Chinese, she’s learning Japanese to adjust to the Occupation. She looks like a shadow of her former self, and we’re not sure why — is it a lingering sense of degradation after losing her virginity for no reason? the long effects of poverty and Japanese occupation? simple loneliness and isolation? We’ve never seen her before with such an expression of defeat, and it’s dark.

Then her old friends rediscover her and recruit her back to the same mission, except this time they’re working with the real Resistance, and they’re organized. They want her to pick up where she left off, and she does — seating herself back at Mrs. Yee’s mahjong table, catching Yee’s eye. But there’s something different this time, something we feel so acutely but can’t put our fingers on. There’s something darker. 1942 is a very different world than 1938, for both of them. They are different people.

How does she do it, with that round face and precious lips? How does she capture the stresses of living this double life so beautifully and seamlessly? Tang Wei is always on point, always watchable, yet is asked to encompass so many conflicting emotions at once that her performance is a small miracle. It’s as if her character is most real when she must pretend to be someone she’s not.

Then add sex and stir. Her emotions become all the more convoluted when Yee finds ways to sleep with her — at first in the most brutal, sadistic manner, akin to how he tortures members of the Resistance; and gradually in ways that express a shared passion that captures all they are still hiding from one another, all they despise about themselves.

This is not romance, although sometimes they pretend it is. This is smut, dirty and fiery and beyond all reason. It’s fantastic, and it destroys their souls. I’m sure someone out there will argue that Chia Chi “falls in love” with Yee, but I will argue most fervently that this is not any kind of recognizable love. This is urgent and awful and demoralizing, and it erases traces of the self you thought you were. It’s fantastic to watch — again, this is really goddamn close to pornography — but grueling to identify with. Chia Chi and Yee can only experience this kind of sex because of the horrible things they’ve done in their other lives, the kinds of people they’ve sunk to being. The sex is so intense because they recognize the dark in each other. 

And still they pretend. Yee invites her to a Japanese tea house where the veneer of Japanese politeness is thin but insistent. As a small protest against its Japaneseness, Chia Chi sings a romantic Chinese song and dances alluringly for Yee in the weird privacy of a room with paper walls. The sense of defeat is everywhere. But they pretend it’s not, and they pretend they feel love for one another. It breaks your heart — not because of a tragic love, but because each of these people is splitting apart in their souls.

Tang Wei. Keep your eyes open for her — I can only hope she gets more roles of such range and depth. I bow down before her skill.

For the love of Asian cinema: “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000)

I’m no fool: I know you’ve already seen Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by recounting the plot. This is a post for fellow fans who’ve also watched this film with that odd mixture of wonder and delight. Watching this film again reminded me how much I actually laughed out loud at some of the action sequences in which these amazing martial arts experts’ legs move, cartoon-like, as they fly up the sides of buildings, across rooftops, or from the tip-top of a bamboo shoot to another. I wasn’t laughing exactly because it was ridiculous, or because it was funny, although it came up right next to those. I laughed because I could not blink lest I miss something. How, I ask, is it possible for this film to mix in what you might otherwise say are ridiculous action elements — elements that actually provoke an unusual kind of awe-struck laughter — yet never, ever lose its audience?

I have two answers for you — and the first is, because of the contrasting love stories, of course. Let’s start with the heartbreaking quietness between Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), each expert in the fighting arts. Now having reached middle age, they’ve longed for each other for years, but have been kept apart by their mutual dedication to custom. In the quietest, most restrained way, Mu Bai is now willing to set the sword aside — as well as his vows to his warrior order — to be with Shu Lien at last. In every interaction, we see these two hesitantly move toward each other, acknowledge their love; yet each scene is marked by their continued hesitation. It’s like a great 19th-c. novel, in which the character feel deep passion but must never touch one another.

And holy crap, Michelle Yeoh! and Chow Yun-Fat! Was there ever a more beautiful and self-possessed pair in filmic history? I remember way back when I saw it in the theater, the local reviewer called Yeoh “the thinking man’s hubba-hubba,” which captures as perfectly as I can imagine how watchable she is, how intelligent she appears, and how convincingly she appears in all those fight sequences. (See here for a nice piece on Yeoh by our friend JustMeMike.) You’d never guess she’d never taken a martial arts class in her life, but choreographs her fight sequences using her years of dance training.

If Shu Lien and Mu Bai are the pinnacles of reserved, cool-headed longing for one another, the love between Jen (Zhang Ziyi) and Lo (Chang Chen) is all passion and fire and impulsiveness. Even though she’s now set to marry another, Jen cannot forget Lo, the mountain bandit with whom she lived all those months. Theirs is a classic hate-at-first-sight romance, just like in classic bodice-ripping Harlequin romances; theirs are the most unrestrained, vicious wrestling matches ever filmed between a man and woman (I believe this the proper use of “wrastling”), which transmogrify satisfactorily into passionate, genuinely turn-you-on lovemaking.So that’s the first thing: the contrast of the yearning, reserved restraint of Yeoh/Chow, and the woo-hoo! of Zheng/Chang. The second thing is the feminism, which is so overwhelming and explicit I can’t believe no one made much of it at the time. And it’s not just that the fight sequences always feature women — who win — nor that the best sequence faces off Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in the very best, funniest, most exciting matchup ever. The heart of the story relies on the fact that its three main female characters (Jen, Shu Lien, and Jen’s governess, Jade Fox) have each been foiled in their attempts to live as they desire because they are women. Each takes a different approach in response, and they inevitably find themselves in opposition with one another as well as with men.

Let me be clear: the feminism is explicit and exciting throughout this film, and gives it a conceptual drumbeat that makes the film unexpectedly exhilarating. (With sentences like that, can you tell I’ve been reading James Agee’s film reviews?) The terrific fight sequence between Shu Lien and Jen is partly so thrilling because you don’t know who to root for — or, more precisely, you don’t know whether you can root for the impetuous, talented Jen over Shu Lien. As you watch Jen with the “Green Destiny” sword she stole from Mu Bai, you feel a genuine anxiety: you cannot quite believe she’d be winning that fight without it, yet her mastery is delicious. Likewise delicious is Jen’s shootout in the wayside inn, where she dresses as a boy and then flies through the building, defeating every man in her path. Best fight sequence ever.

I’ll admit that the first time I saw this film (and perhaps the second time, too), I was just mesmerized by its humor, action sequences, beauty, creativity. The significance of the contrasting love stories and the on-the-surface feminism weren’t as clear as they are to me now. But when you watch this film again — and I say when because you need to see it again — notice how unabashedly it relies on those two plot elements. And you may still find your jaw dropping open with awe and pleasure.

Fragments

I’ve been focusing on all manner of academic things this week, so my mind is fragmented. These thoughts don’t add up to anything, but it’s the extent of my ideas about movies and words and women and men.

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the amazing 2000 film from Ang Lee that only gets better on re-viewing except I had to watch it on a TV screen rather than on the very large screen where I saw it, twice, when it came out. Oh, Michelle Yeoh, I worship at your feet. (Stay tuned for more about this film.)

2. A lovely line from the new Tony Kushner play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, coming from the old union laborer’s mouth that expresses something beautiful about what it means to be proud of your labor and your union:

We did something utterly remarkable then, which no one now appreciates, but it was, it was working-class guys, working-class with no, no training, no politics, facing down their fear of being called bums and featherbedders and crooks and insisting not merely on the worker’s right to a wage but the worker’s right to a share in the wealth, a right to be alive, a right to control time itself! When we won the Guaranteed Income, we took hold of the logic of time and money that enriches men like then and devours men like us, and we broke its fucking back.

3. Another lovely fragment from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (overall: it was good). When Joey, the young son leaves his country college and goes to New York for the first time and sees the circus of street life taking place in the city:

every moment was like a poem that he immediately memorized.

4. Kitchen Stories (2003), a funny and sweet Norwegian film by Bent Hamer that should be imported directly into anthropology classes, since it’s a perfect expression of what happens during participant observation. To wit: to understand old Norwegian bachelors’ uses of their kitchens, the observer sets up an umpire’s chair in the corner. What could go wrong?

5. Another fragment, this from Junot Díaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The teenaged Oscar is in love with a girl, and the two of them begin to talk — long, rambling phone calls that start from nowhere, building on the everyday, yet:

and off they’d gone, building another one of their word-scrapers.

(Díaz: I might’ve gone for word castles, given Oscar’s romantic nature, but I re-read that paragraph four times for the pleasure of it.)

6. Felicity Huffman. We’re watching the ’90s series Sports Night for the first time (overall: it is good) but Huffman is the kind of actress who seems so compelling, far beyond the way her character’s written. As with all of Aaron Sorkin’s women, her character is manic and neurotic. Yet there’s a way Huffman can peer through those eyes, cock an eyebrow (and nobody cocks eyebrows the way she does), and make you want to make out with her. Which reminds me, of course, of her multiple prizewinning turn in Transamerica as the transsexual Bree, during which I could not imagine that she had not once been a man. It makes me so sad that she’s been relegated to Desperate Housewives all this time.

Movies to cry to

from Yôjirô Takita's Departures

Here’s my rule: I don’t want to put any movies on this list that feel like cheap manipulators. Did I cry during The Notebook? Well, of course, and the whole time I felt as if I’d been used. In fact, I have a list of films I refuse to see because I anticipate that those tearjerkers will merely make me feel jerked around (Titanic, etc. — and despite the promises of my Dear Friend I can’t bring myself to watch Love Actually).

That said, readers of Feminéma know that I emote at the movies all the time — why, only recently I’ve mentioned having unexpected outbursts during Summer Hours, Killer of Sheep, and The Beaches of Agnès. (What can I say, but that I feel movies truly, madly, deeply?) Let me explain that this list emerges not from an eagerness to weep, but rather the firm belief that some of the best films draw tears without making you feel cheap — in fact, I’d watch these movies again this minute if I had the chance — and without making you determined never to watch them again (ahem: Breaking the Waves. Never, ever again). The tears they provoke seem to spring from something honest and human. Inspired by a comment from Tam (and borrowing shamelessly from the list she offered) this is a preliminary attempt to think about when, and how, outpourings of sentiment at the movies seem authentic as well as pleasurable.

Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson in Truly Madly Deeply

Weeping ritually with Departures (Okuribito, Yôjirô Takita, 2008). A beautiful film about a young man who finally gives up on his plans to be a musician and returns to his hometown to start working — mostly by accident — as someone who ritually prepares dead bodies for burial. It’s funny and surprising for many reasons, and you start to wish someone will display that much care with your body when you die.

Weeping for lost chances with 84, Charing Cross Road (David Hugh Jones, 1987). I’ve already discussed this film, which is oriented around the long, beautiful, eccentric correspondence between a New Yorker and the London bookstore clerk who supplies her with good reading material. Books, letters, and a quasi-romance between Anne Bancroft and Antony Hopkins — weeper heaven.

Soulful, stiff-upper-lipped: Anthony Hopkins in 84, Charing Cross Road

Weeping out of pride for your fellow humans with Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976). I have a whole post a-brewin’ about labor, but suffice it to say that this might be the most amazing documentary you’ll ever see — about a strike by coal miners in Kentucky who express eloquently their rights as workers in America. It brings tears to your eyes for what we’ve lost: a sense of pride in labor and the strikers’ certainty that employers are not always right. Oh, how far we’ve fallen as a nation since 1976.

Harlan County, U.S.A. and their proud signs

Weeping for reality with The Return of Navajo Boy (Jeff Spitz & Bennie Klain, 2000). Another documentary. Sometimes my students make statements that reveal that they don’t think Indians exist anymore. This documentary about the most-photographed Navajo family in history — people typically photographed in “traditional” clothing, making blankets or some other goddamn “traditional” Indian thing — is about their real lives and the difficulties they face when most Americans refuse to believe they are anything but cardboard cutouts, much less a people whose history is always changing.

The Begays talk back to John Wayne in Return of Navajo Boy

Weeping for love with Truly, Madly, Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1990). Back to narrative film with this amazing tale of a woman missing, terribly and deeply, her dead boyfriend — when suddenly his ghost returns to her. She’s so happy to see him, except having a ghost for a boyfriend turns out to be more of a problem than it might appear at first.

Weeping for nostalgia and happiness with Up (Pixar, 2009). Criminey. Who would’ve thought, walking into a big 3-D Pixar summer release, that within 5 minutes you’d have lost weight from the weeping? Loved everything about this movie, and I’d see it again this minute, but next time I’ll have a stockpile of kleenex close by.

Why does Up kill off the fabulous Ellie so early in the film? Dang.

…and Tam also recommends The Winter Guest (Alan Rickman, 1997), which I haven’t seen yet.

Honorable mentions, for their massive tear-jerking capability primarily in the very last scenes:

• Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004).
• Three films by Ang Lee: Sense and Sensibility (1995), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). What can I say but that that guy is crazy good at drawing big tears out of me.
• Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003).
• Toy Story 3 (Pixar, 2010).

Note that I’ve left off all the overdetermined tearjerkers: An Affair to Remember (1957) because of that cringe-making scene from Sleepless in Seattle (1993); all those dude weepers that I don’t quite get, like Good Will Hunting (1997), Field of Dreams (1989), and Brian’s Song (1971); and a couple of films like Dancer in the Dark that are just too goddamn much.

I know we’ve got a whole set of cheap stereotypes about women weeping at the movies. But the best films make us cry because we can’t help but feel with those characters. Admit it: you love it.