"Lee is like Ozu-or Vermeer-in the subtlety and the lack of show or fuss with which he opens up inner space and lets us discover the mixed feelings of those who live there."-David Thomson
We complete our fall survey of the cinema of King Hu and Ang Lee with Lee's works from 1995 to the present. Throughout his career, Lee has walked a fine line, carving out his own art of ambivalence and embracing contradictions to maximize the resonance and appeal of his films. Is he Chinese or Taiwanese or Chinese-American, or all three? His family comes from China, he grew up in Taiwan, and he has lived and worked in the United States for over twenty years. His body of work encompasses Taiwanese and American family melodrama (Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm), English period comedy (Sense and Sensibility), and Chinese martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); he brings Western perspectives to Chinese topics and Chinese perspectives...
