‘Father Knows Best’: Ang Lee’s forgotten Chinese trilogy
Due to the differences in how the industry operates in either country, there aren’t many high-profile Chinese auteurs to have carried on the success they experienced in their homeland in the United States or vice versa, although Ang Lee stands out as a very clear exception to have mastered both.
Wong Kar-wai has never shown any interest in directing a Stateside production, while Jackie Chan may have become an international crossover star who’s helmed over a dozen features, but none of them were backed by American studios. John Woo gradually slipped downwards the longer he stayed in Tinseltown, and Zhang Yimou suffered the biggest flop of his career when he worked with Matt Damon, which makes Lee’s seamless transition all the more impressive.
Debuting in unequivocally Westernised cinema with a Jane Austen adaptation of all things, the director’s acclaimed Sense and Sensibility gave rise to intense drama The Ice Storm, revisionist Western Ride with the Devil, comic book blockbuster Hulk, the modern classic Brokeback Mountain, the eye-popping Life of Pi, and the dismal Will Smith vehicle Gemini Man to name just a few.
In the last 30 years, Lee has only returned to China for two films, but Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution were phenomenal in their own right. The former helped make wuxia more popular on an international scale than it had arguably ever been, while the latter set a record as the highest-grossing NC-17 film ever made after refusing to tone down its erotic elements to appease the censors.
Along the way, Lee has three Academy Awards under his belt – two for ‘Best Director’ – to go along with his five Baftas and quintet of Golden Globes. It’s been a remarkable career, but the downside is that Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman – his first three features released between 1991 and 1994 known as the ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy – often tend to be left out of the conversation, largely due to their status as his cinematic beginnings.
Three completely different and unconnected stories following an elderly tai chi master struggling to adapt to life in New York after moving in with his Americanised son, a gay man who agrees to marry a green card-seeking woman to avoid coming into conflict with his traditional parents, and an older patriarch living at home with his three grown and unmarried daughters respectively, each of them hit many of the same thematic beats to coalesce into a trio that reflect many of the same sentiments.
In their own way, all three seek to bridge the gap between Chinese and American culture, something Lee experienced himself after growing up in Taiwan and finishing his education in the United States. Whether it’s the bond between a father and son, the pressures of tradition dictating the repression of one’s true and uninhibited self, or the societal stigma of marriage being a barometer of life’s success, Lee mines the drama, pathos, and comedy in equal measure in a trilogy that speaks to both sides of the divide equally.
Ruminations on class, gender, displacement, and inner struggles have been hallmarks of Lee’s more well-known films and integral to everything from Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain to Life of Pi and even Hulk, but the ‘Father Knows Best’ series finds them at their most achingly raw, if only because it’s clear the filmmaker has a deep-rooted connection to the travails found within.
The dichotomy between strict parents caught up in their rigid worldview on how tradition, hierarchy, and family should be structured being juxtaposed by the modern and progressive views of the younger set remains as relevant now as it was three decades ago, with the overarching theme of all three being a desire to not quite meet in the middle, but find a resolution that benefits each party without having to completely reinvent who they are on a foundational level.
While that sounds heavy – and it is, in fairness – Lee handles everything with such deftness and a lightness of touch that so easily and winningly veers into the comedic that sermonising is never a concern. Anchored by very real attitudes and how they may or may not buckle in the face of inevitable change, even the title of the ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy is suitably subversive given all that unfolds.
