The heartfelt movie Ang Lee compared to “revisiting my own past”
There’s a natural emotional weight to the movies of Ang Lee, and his works are well-regarded for the way their characters try to suppress their emotions before allowing them to bubble to the surface slowly. Famously, Lee came into the public’s eye with his Taiwanese films Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman.
Following that success, Lee made his impression on Hollywood, beginning with 1995’s costume drama Sense and Sensibility before he won the ‘Best Director’ Academy Award for his excellent romantic drama Brokeback Mountain, a feat he would double up on with 2012’s Life of Pi.
The Taiwanese director’s works have been admired from all four corners of the globe, but that has never stopped him from naming the filmmakers that he cherishes and respects. Lee once spoke glowingly of the 2019 comedy-drama The Farewell, directed by Lulu Wang, in a feature with Variety.
Lee said that Wang’s film felt like he was “revisiting my own past” in terms of the fact that he had made the 1993 movie The Wedding Banquet and saw a number of similarities between the two works. “Both works centre on a family celebration that’s based on a fundamental lie,” he said.
The Farewell stars Awkwafina, Tzi Ma, Diana Lin and Zhao Shuzhen and focuses on a Chinese American family who organise a gathering for their terminally ill grandmother who doesn’t know how sick she is. The Wedding Banquet is Lee’s romantic comedy in which a gay man gets married to hide his sexuality.
The director admits that his 1993 film has a wedding that is indeed “a sham, an attempt to hide the main character’s gay identity from his Taiwanese family,” while The Farewell sees the banquet “mask the fact that the grandmother Nai Nai is terminally ill, something that is known to everyone except her – the joyous celebration is also a disguised, melancholy farewell.”
There’s also the interaction between Chinese and American cultures in The Farewell, which is something that Lee connects with. “This awkwardness is embodied in the character of Billi, who was born in China but moved to the States when she was six years old,” he said. “Her feeling of displacement is at the heart of the film’s two most affecting scenes.”
Lee continued: “First, when Billi reveals to her mother how much she missed growing up in China, how lost she felt as a child in America; and second, Billi’s farewell to her grandmother when she returns to the States. Such a scene could easily have been very sentimental; instead, it’s stoic and moving and quiet — a testimony to Lulu Wang’s control of her material and a lovely ending to a very heartfelt and personal film.”
