Word: chen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cheung swaps airy gossip with visitors but promptly falls into his silky, sulky character when Chen calls him to shoot. Even the finicky director agrees it is perfect the first time. "One-take Leslie!" the crew exclaims, as Cheung bows...
...Chen and Woo are separated by 10 time zones and vast differences in manpower and cuisine. Chen is making an art film he hopes will be popular, Woo a popular film he hopes will be artful. Both are spearheading the most adventurous, fascinating movie movement of the '90s: Chinese films from the People's Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan...
...reel world, Western cinephiles have a three-China policy. They embrace mainland dramas by artists like Chen and Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern). They are beguiled by the Taiwanese domestic comedies of Ang Lee (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) and impressed by the daunting meditations of Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Good Men Good Women). And they get their giddy thrills from the wild Hong Kong action films featuring Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat, who are two of the world's top movie stars. Chinese pictures cannily appeal to audiences of every brow--high, middle...
...Chinese censor knows these pictures are salable products elsewhere, so even if he bans them at home he allows them to be shown in festivals and commercially abroad. This is the new dictum in China: dissident citizens are exiled; dissident films are exported. Says Chen, whose Concubine was shown cut at home and whose 1991 Life on a String has yet to be released there: "I am a Chinese director who finds himself making films for the international market...
...Because Chen's Temptress Moon, like Zhang's Triad, is set in Shanghai before the 1949 revolution, both directors can expect their new films to be seen in China. But what can these profligately gifted filmmakers do next? Perhaps emigrate to America, where they can join John Woo and Ang Lee in showing Hollywood how to blend film technique with personal fire. But to do so would be to renounce the people, problems and landscape they have devoted their careers to putting eloquently on film. Maybe they should move down to Hong Kong in 1997, and hope for the best...