Sat, Mar 04, 2006 page8

• Editorial: The rise and rise of Ang Lee

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  Ang Lee (李安) is a filmmaker whose career trajectory rises higher every film he makes. Many Taiwanese will be rooting for him to win Best Director at the Academy Awards for Brokeback Mountain in a couple of days, but this is only the latest work in his extraordinarily eclectic portfolio. Unlike clumsy politicians who would appropriate Lee's background and fame for short-term gain, sensible people know that Lee is not so arrogant to attempt to speak for this or any other nation.

  Lee's relationship with the US has been as lengthy as that with Taiwan. He worked on Spike Lee's student short feature Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads in the early 1980s, before eventually finding financing for features back in Taiwan, including Eat Drink Man Woman, which remains one of modern Taiwanese film's most elegant and delightful entries.

  Unlike master director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), who has in recent years strayed into dismal political territory with selective attacks on public figures over alleged ethnic labeling, Lee has steered quite clear of overt political material in his films and in his public appearances.

  But the subtexts of his films are no less challenging, if more subtle, than the politics of his country of birth. Lee has said that in Taiwan he felt like an outsider while growing up, a feeling that followed him to the US. Instead, film is his reality.

  In his films, this subtle ache of isolation -- the tenuousness of filial piety, social estrangement and distress and the tensions that arise from competing objects of devotion -- is surely informed by his upbringing and the ethnic disjunctures that seem to have left Lee, a Mainlander, non-plussed about the role of politics in life.

  Lee's significant contribution to film culture is his ability to get inside the cultures and characters he depicts and inject them with insight and maturity in a way that transcends stereotypes of Asian or Western film. It is an achievement that few who cross this "boundary" can claim; not even Hong Kong director John Woo (吳宇森), despite all of his intelligence and ferocious energy, has been able to look into the eyes of his characters and draw out such complexity.

  All in all, Taiwan cannot claim credit for Lee's success, despite the memorable films he made here. Yet Lee's career is a model for all Taiwanese to follow: Embrace the world and all that it offers.

  So there is a lesson in Lee's journey for those who care to consider it: Let Taiwanese shed their provincialism and self-doubt and cultivate individuality, talent and passion rather than meekly subject themselves to the agendas of government and political miscreants.

  And let them also find comfort among their limitations and scars: Hulk, Lee's remarkable allegory of child abuse and healing, teaches us that there are times when people with dignity who have been horribly mistreated are allowed to become very, very angry before finding some kind of peace with themselves.
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