About Ang Lee and His Films

Recently I read an article about director Ang Lee. The author of this article is David Minnihan. Ang Lee is a Chinese director born in Taiwan, who is educated for filmmaking in America. In David Minnihan article, he briefly introduces Lee’s films from his school work to the award-winning masterpiece to the reader. He divides Lee’s filmmaking into three periods according to the influence of Lee’s relationship with his father on his films. Minnihan concludes that through Lee’s films, despite their diversity, we can always fine a line which is the family and mostly the relationship between him and his father for his early movies. Minnihan also states that Lee’s films capture the essence of Chinese culture and family dynamics. What is more, his exploration about the Western and Eastern traditions is admirable. As a Westerner who maybe not very familiar with Oriental culture, Minnihan’s analysis about Lee and his films are fairly precise. For me, what I really appreciate is that the powerful presentation of characters’ sensibility in Lee’s film.

In many of Lee’s films, he chooses the family as the main theme to display the plots, which is a wise way to present the complex of characters’ sensibility. When characters have to deal with the relationship with their parents, children and brothers as well as the conflicts related to these relatives, even a little decision would have significant impacts on others. In order to continue their own lives in an ideal way, they tried to find the solutions for problems and satisfy relatives’ expectations. However, the characters usually failed at last which is also true in real society. In these situations, the presentation of characters is difficult to achieve. But Lee successfully shaped the characters that are the center of the family conflicts and made this complexity attractive to audiences. His early films such as (The Wedding Banquet, 1993) and mature films (Sense and Sensibility, 1995) may be this type of presentation. However, his later films like Brokeback Mountain (2005), which the family is not the main theme, yet produces two characters who have to face the conflicts from society. When one of the protagonists was told the death of his lover, he was suddenly trapped into the sadness that he couldn’t tall. It is the most impressive scene in this film and probably the best for Lee’s films in my opinion. This scene is powerful enough to allow audience to recall the unfortunate history of two protagonists and the sadness after the end of this film.

Through the reading Minnihan’s essay about Ang Lee and his films, I realize that the common emotions of human being are worth for exploration at whenever by using a medium like the cinema. And it does not have to imply a very complicated story.