Family Matters

I know I promised you all a column about Shout! Studios’ new 4K edition of Mike Nichols’ Catch-22, but Warner’s new UHD restoration of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest just showed up and those two movies go together in a really interesting way, so I’m going to tackle them together on the weekend. For now, let’s drill into an excellent new collection from Australia’s Via Vision: Father Knows Best – A Trilogy: Directed by Ang Lee.

Clunky title aside, this is a very nice collection of the movies Lee made in the early ’90s with the actor Lung Sihung: Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman. Each film casts Lung as a patriarchal figure in a story of a family trying to navigate between tradition and modernity – one as a drama, another as a queer comedy of manners and the third as something in between, a multi-stranded narrative about a father who can’t connect to his grown daughters.

Released by different distributors, and only retroactively (and ironically) viewed as a trilogy, these delicate and empathetic films have been overshadowed by in Lee’s filmography by the big studio projects that followed: Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. And those are all solid movies, sure! But there’s something about the modest scale and contemporary settings of these early pictures that still sparkles, a sense of Lee working within his limitations, and building something real.

As Film Freak Central’s Walter Chaw puts it in the essay that accompanies the set: “The trilogy should be read as the process of a man working through the expectations his upbringing has burdened him with.” All three films deal with generational disconnects, as children and grandchildren discover there are other paths available than the ones their parents laid out for them. Lung is always the father or grandfather, always expected to pass judgment on his progeny – and sometimes discovering that his opinion has not been asked for.

In Pushing Hands, the conflict is largely between Lung’s tai-chi instructor Chen, freshly arrived in New York, and his American daughter-in-law Martha (Deb Snyder), whose failure to live up to Master Chu’s expectations is in no way her fault, but can’t help but complicate the efforts of her husband Alex (Bo Z. Wang) to be a good son to his traditional father.

Lee's debut feature struggled to find distribution in the US, getting a modest (if critically acclaimed) theatrical run. But it broke out in Taiwan, where audiences knew Lung from decades of film and television work and were glad to see him back on-screen. He was named Best Actor at Taipei's Golden Horse film festival – and his co-star Wang Lai, who plays a widowed cooking teacher Master Chu meets at a community center, won Best Supporting Actress – and the movie was enough of a hit to get Lee's next project rolling.

The Wedding Banquet, the loosest of the three films, is also about being a good son. Lung plays a supporting role as the ailing Mr. Gao, who has traveled from Taiwan to America with his wife (Gua Ah-leh) for the marriage of their son Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) to the Chinese artist Wei-Wei (May Chin). But what Wai-Tung’s parents don’t know is that it’s a sham wedding, because Wai-Tung – who’s never come out to his parents – is really in love with Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), and just doing this to make his parents happy. Wei-Wei, who’s more of a pragmatist, is doing it for a green card.

One well-intentioned deception begets another, and what was supposed to be a simple courthouse ceremony turns into a massive affair – and other elements complicate things even further. Lee and Schamus’ script has the structure of a screwball farce, though the pacing and mood are a little less frenetic; still, the bones are there, and Andrew Ahn’s recent update even found some new complications for its reimagined cast of characters.

Finally, there’s Eat Drink Man Woman, which finds Lee shifting from New York to Taipei to put Lung at the center of a lazy-Susan structure as Mr. Zhu, an aging chef beloved for his culinary skills but whose three daughters – eldest Jia-Jen (Yang Kuei-mei), middle child Jia-Chien (Wu Chien-lein) and kid sister Jia Ning (Wang Yu-wen) – have all followed different paths, none of them his. Well, Jia Ning works at a Wendy’s, but that hardly counts.

Lee and Schamus juggle the daughters’ various career and relationship struggles with Mr. Zhu’s own efforts to build a life for himself in retirement, offering a mixture of perspectives on life in Taipei and a lot of really appealing meals. Eat Drink Man Woman arrived at the tail end of the international foodie wave that started with Babette’s Feast and Tampopo, and MGM went hard on the “don’t see this movie hungry” marketing. They weren’t wrong; Mr. Zhu’s food looks absolutely mouthwatering. But part of its appeal is our understanding that it’s where he puts all the love he can’t otherwise express.

“I think a lot of us begin to reckon with our relationships with our fathers once we become [fathers] ourselves,” Walter also writes in that essay, noting that Lee was a father himself when he started making Pushing Hands, and perhaps that explains the complexity of the relationships he and James Schamus plot out for their characters. Each film in the Father Knows Best trilogy is ultimately about responsibility; it could be argued that Lee’s entire body of work is. But these three express it most directly and earnestly, and I think that’s why they’ve stayed with me.

The Father Knows Best trilogy now plays as a clear declaration of Lee’s intentions as a filmmaker and the importance of his partnership with writer-producer Schamus – as well as a lovely snapshot of the independent movie boom of three decades ago, when audiences consistently showed up for new, interesting filmmakers and anything seemed possible. And this Imprint boxed set is a fine way to celebrate them.

Imprint’s set offers all three features in 1080p/24 masters, with their original mono soundtracks in lossless PCM audio. The discs are packed in the label’s signature hardbox package, each accompanied by a retrospective video appreciation by the academic Michael Berry, author of 2005’s Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, and a selection of archival extras.

“The Center of Gravity,” “A Forbidden Passion” and “A Feast for the Eyes” were produced for earlier releases of Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, respectively, and Lee and Schamus offer their separate thoughts on the latter two films in interviews produced for a European Blu-ray collection a decade ago. (The Wedding Banquet also offers a catch-up with co-star Lichtenstein.)

Sadly, Imprint wasn’t able to secure the Pushing Hands roundtable from Film Movement’s more recent US Blu, in which Schamus, producer Ted Hope and editor Tim Squyres mark the film’s 30^th anniversary. But Lee wasn’t present for that, so maybe including it in a boxed set that bears his name would have been weird.

Father Knows Best – A Trilogy: Directed by Ang Lee is available directly from Via Vision Entertainment, and can be found as an import in your finer brick-and-mortar shops.

Up next: Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest offer an interesting window on how American cinema engaged with counterculture icons … but first, there’s Friday’s What’s Worth Watching  for subscribers to the paid tier. Update that subscription so you don’t miss the my reviews of Predator: Badlands and Die My Love!