XXX, the Ang Lee Film

Also, Ang Lee uses a lot of coverage shots so that we can see how the two characters interact with each other above the jungle. Audiences have a chance to read Jen’s body language, Jen’s expression, or Li Mubai’s kung fu sequence and so on. Usually, at some major plots, other directors tend to use close-ups to show the protagonist or the antagonist’s expression, but in here, audiences barely see the close-ups of their faces. Ang Lee says that “A movie should be like a well-designed video game. Set it up so that people can play the game in their own way and never get tired of it” (?????). In the film The Wedding Banquet, when Wei Tong, the Chinese gay guy, opens the closet to his mother in the hospital when his father is in the patient’s room, for the whole scene, it is only one long shot. At this emotional state of the film, Ang Lee lets us approach this scene from two completely different perspectives- the pain and shame Wei Tong is experiencing and the confusion and realization raised in his mother’s head. Later, the camera shifts and audiences see Simon, Wei Tong’s American boyfriend, and Wei-wei, a disguised wife of Wei Tong’s. Their astonishments are documented in the frame, so Ang Lee created at least four different ways to look at this scene: just like a role play video game. By giving audiences several ways to choose whichever the way they want to take is an action of Tao, and by doing so, audiences may find the way that affect them more. For example, the mothers at their 50s will be impacted more by the mother character instead of Wei Tong, the protagonist, because the bond between them is much tighter.

Meanwhile, Ang Lee really uses the branches to reflect the characters’ states of mind. In Horace Fairlamb’s essay “Rom...

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... daughter gets pregnant even though she is still a student at school. The earliest three films by Ang Lee including Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman are generalized as “The Father Knows The Best Trilogy”, and just like the title of this trilogy: by showing how little the daughters know about life, the contrast reveals how much the father knows about life and how much love there is between the father and the daughters.

As a result, an audience may realize that it is Taoism what keeps all of Ang Lee’s films connected. Taoism is Ang Lee’s not-so-obvious fingerprint. By using the Taoism belief in different aspects of the film like the camera, the composition, the art direction etc., audiences have freedom in the world his film created to choose the way they perceive the most authenticity about the character and the world the character is in.