Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/09/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 9, 2022

Pushing Hands (Ang Lee, 1991)

Cast: Sihung Lung, Lai Wang, Bozhao Wang, Deb Snyder, Fanny De Luz, Haan Lee, Hung-Chang Wang. Screenplay: Ang Lee, James Schamus. Cinematography: Jong Lin. Production Design: Scott Bradley. Film editing: Ang Lee, Tim Squyres. Music: Tai-An Hsu, Xiaosong Qu.

I admire Ang Lee’s Pushing Hands because it takes its story up to a point where a more conventional film would have found an easy resolution to the plot, and then it doesn’t go there. Mr. Chu (Sihung Lung), an elderly tai chi instructor, has come to America to live with Alex (Bozhao Wang) and Martha (Deb Snyder), his son and daughter-in-law. Mr. Chu speaks no English and Martha speaks no Mandarin, and when they’re left alone together during the day, tensions flare. She’s trying to write a novel – her first has just been published – but his presence in the small suburban house proves a constant distraction, a irritant that causes tension not only between Martha and her father-in-law, but also between husband and wife. Mr. Chu teaches tai chi at a local community center, where he makes friends with Mrs. Chen (Lai Wang), an elderly widow who likewise lives with her Americanized children. When things reach an explosive point at home, Alex decides to try making a match between his father and Mrs. Chen. Things seem to be going well in that direction: Both families go on a picnic together, and Mr. Chu uses some of his tai chi training to help Mrs. Chen with a pain she has in her shoulder. But just as we can see the conventional happy ending on the horizon, Mrs. Chen rebels against the matchmaking, expressing her own bitterness at being manipulated by others. This avoidance of sentimentality is what strengthens Lee’s film, his first. It’s an enormously likable movie, with a couple of flaws: Martha is written and played with more shrill edginess than is entirely credible. Couldn’t an obviously intelligent woman married to a man who speaks Mandarin and whose small son is learning it have managed to learn at least a few phrases to communicate with her father-in-law? And Alex’s destructive rage – he destroys the kitchen when the tensions get too high – feels a bit over the top.