August 30, 2008
"I tell you the story because I was raised the Chinese way. I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, and to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way. Maybe it is because she was born to m...( read more)e and she was born a girl, and I was born to my mother and I was born a girl, all of us like stairs, one step after another, going up, going down, but always going the same way."
Wayne Wang's fine adaptation of Amy Tan's best-selling "The Joy Luck Club" had an enormous importance in the breakthrough for films about Asians in America. Beautifully made and acted and emotionally moving in the bargain, this Bergman-esque dramatic study of relationships between Chinese mothers and daughters through the century is still widely accessible to all viewers, although women will certainly comprise the base audience. A surprising entry from Hollywood Pictures, this lovely production hasn't aged a bit, like no film about human beings ever does. Instead, The Joy Luck Club may prove to be the most important Chinese-American film ever made.
Conventional Hollywood wisdom offered many excuses why Tan's novel, the No. 1 fiction best-seller of 1989, would not make a viable film: it centered on Asian women. The names and faces would be confusing. Too many stories jumping around in time, and much of the dialogue would need to be in Chinese. Quite impressively, however, screenwriters Tan and Ronald Bass and director Wang solved all these potential problems in a very lucid explication of the major tales related in the book. Even more important from a commercial point of view, they've retained, and perhaps even magnified, the universal emotional qualities of the material, making this story of innumerable hardships and sacrifices one that was destined to move and inspire audiences worldwide.
Joy Luck Club is an "immigrants" picture par excellence. Beautifully put together, the film is an emotionally heart-rending study of generational gap - but also continuity - between Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters. The film probes such universal issues as mothers' expectations for, pressure on, and disappointment in their daughters when they don't surpass them, when they end up being just as victimized or abused as they were in China.
I couldn't do justice to the richness of the film and book (which I read about a decade ago, in the 6th grade). The exposition, which embraces decades and goes back and forth from past to present, and from one woman to another, is always lucid and riveting. What unifies the episodic structure is a farewell party for June (Ming-Na Wen), one of the daughters, as she is ready to go to China and meet her twin sisters. Their mother was forced to abandon the twin babies during her flight from war-torn China.
Another touching (and surprisingly funny) episode is when one of June's mahjong-playing aunties, Lindo (Tsai Chin) tells how she was sold into marriage by her mother when she was 15, and how she and her daughter Waverly (Tamlyn Tomita) endured hard years before they finally reached reconciliation. Rose (Rosalind Chao), married to an insensitive, career-oriented white (Andrew McCarthy), reveals the devastating saga of her mother An Mei (Lisa Lu), who was one of many wives to a Chinese lord and sacrificed herself for her daughter.
As filmed, the entire story is a fabrication that allows each woman to experience an extended flashback that highlights the flashpoint moments in her life. Each mother's flashback merges into her daughter's memories. The boundaries are not always separable and each of the eight stories told here are engrossing and stirring. The gravity of the events that these women experienced in China, the differences and similarities in the lives of these daughters who've grown up in America - none of that pain and suffering is evident from a cursory glance at their lives. Within the film, they scratch past the surface and pierce our sensibilities with marksman-like precision.
The casting must have been a major challenge, as each of the eight women is beautiful and distinctive. Naturally, the acting is variable, ranging from splendid performances by the veteran actresses (Tsai Chin, Rosalind Chao, France Nuyen and Lisa Lu) to not as great ones by the younger ones (especially Ming Na-Wen). The miracle is that the film just happens to be politically correct. It's not a feminist agenda picture (although some of the men eventually come out as selfish cunts), and though dealing with Asian-American women, it propagates cultural diversity and it's essentially a film most people can relate to.
Ingmar Bergman, who was also fascinated by women, made some of his best films about them. In its sensibility and style, The Joy Luck Club brings to mind Cries and Whispers and especially Autumn Sonata, a masterful melodrama about the conflict between a pianist mother (Ingrid Bergman) and her bitter, neglected daughter (Liv Ullmann). As in those films, the visual style here is rich, but not sumptuous and overbearing. As befits its intimate scale and psychological nature, most of the film is done through close-ups. It's a visually splendid film, with Amir Mokri's luminous lensing, Donald Graham Burt's production design and Lydia Tanji's costumes fusing into a rich look that is not overly self-conscious. Toward the end, there's one crucial sequence that is shot in an epic style, recalling Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. It's the only sequence that uses long shots and that somehow "violates" the otherwise personal nature of the material.
My only complaint against the film is that it's too long (2 hours and 20 minutes) and that it contains, as does the book, too many stories and too many flashbacks. But at its best moments, The Joy Luck Club provides a rare perspective of a cultural experience that has been missing from Hollywood productions lately. Each of the stories is different, yet the overall emotional tone is coherent and the thematic link clear: most of the women, of both generations, have been victims in one way or another. And finally, there's something here for all history buffs and people with a slight fascination with China. While the film's focus is always intimate, the fascinating political context makes the issues broader, more resonant. Like all great films, Joy Luck Club is at once particular and universal.
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