Where to begin with Ang Lee

The setting might be contemporary New York or civil war-era Missouri, 18th century England or a magical realist stretch of the Pacific Ocean, but for Ang Lee the approach remains constant: “Wherever I shoot my film, it is a Taiwanese film.” 

Lee, born and raised in Taiwan but based since the 1970s in the US – where he’s made most of his films, beginning with his debut more than three decades ago – mostly makes Hollywood films that are atypical for mid- to big-budget American cinema, the pace unhurried, the drama quietly observational.

That essential patient humanism has remained apparent through all Lee’s work, even as his ambition as a filmmaker has grown. Having spent the first half of his career making gently unfolding dramas, Lee has from the 2000s on branched out with some surprising projects: a wuxia film, a superhero movie, an action thriller. Lee has spent more recent years, meanwhile, experimenting with the latest filmmaking technologies, his cinema becoming more immersive and more reliant on special effects as he searches for new horizons in the cinematic experience.

Lee’s work is full of reserved, solitary types who fit awkwardly in their time and place, but none of the director’s characters are as inarticulate, lonely and repressed as his protagonist in Brokeback Mountain. In 1960s Wyoming, ranch hand Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger, agonisingly withheld) begins a secret romance with fellow herder Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) on a summer job keeping sheep, before Ennis retreats home to start a family with his fiancée (Michelle Williams). Carrying with him the trauma of early loss and a childhood memory of homophobic violence, Ennis can mostly only bring himself to simmer and stew, and occasionally erupt with anger as the years go while he and Jack lead largely separate lives.

As it goes for many of Lee’s characters, it’s pressure from family and environment that keeps Ennis from acting on his true desires. In Brokeback Mountain’s American farmlands, the director finds an ideal visual representation of his protagonist’s inner life, with storms always roiling somewhere on the horizon, and the wide-open spaces suggesting both a freedom tantalisingly in reach and an immense loneliness. The film is Lee’s most moving work, an American tragedy which gets its creeping emotional force from the director’s characteristic restraint, Lee quietly observing as time weighs increasingly heavy on his characters over a misspent 20 years.

Of all the cinematic environs that Lee has visited in his films, he’s returned most often to America, taking a special interest in conveying the character of a territory and its people at various stages of the country’s history. After you’ve left the farm country of Brokeback Mountain, you’ll want to see wintry Connecticut in the ensemble drama The Ice Storm (1997), and the civil war-ravaged Midwest of the revisionist western Ride with the Devil (1999). Like Brokeback Mountain, the two films frame people against nature that represents the characters’ psychological states: halting ice and a blue-grey colour scheme for the suburban malaise of two Watergate-era families in The Ice Storm; endless open wilds for the violent tribalists who’ve left civilisation behind and reverted to their animal natures in Ride with the Devil.

One of Lee’s finest, the erotically charged spy thriller Lust, Caution (2007) is also by some measure his toughest. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese agent Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) is tasked with getting close to and ultimately killing Mr Yee (Tony Leung); a ruthless operative of Japan’s puppet government in Shanghai, Yee makes a sexual plaything of Chia Chi, before he and his would-be assassin begin to unexpectedly develop feelings for one another. It’s explicit, chilling stuff, with numerous scenes of rough sex and an ending that’s haunting in its dispassionate brutality, not to mention a botched murder scene that Lee makes gruesomely prolonged.

Once you’ve experienced Lee’s bleakest vision, you might want to pick yourself up again with his brightest. Sense and Sensibility (1995) is another of Lee’s stories of lovers divided through circumstance and societal expectations, only this one’s gently comic rather than tragic, with Elinor (Emma Thompson, who also wrote the film’s Oscar-winning screenplay), Edward (Hugh Grant) and a host of other characters dancing around relationships they’re too polite and inhibited to initiate. Lee’s Austen adaptation is among cinema’s loveliest, its English landscape a romantic mix of gloomy skies and amber-hued meadows.

There’s more of that light touch to be found in Lee’s first three films, though there’s a dash of melancholy to them too. Three parts of an unofficial whole known as the Father Knows Best trilogy, Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) each focus on a Taiwanese family wrestling with identity in a modern city – New York in the first two, Taipei in the third – and perceived obligations to family that collide with their true desires. Reflecting the director’s own personal experiences (as a New Yorker with family back home in Taiwan) more than any of his other work, the trilogy also charts Lee’s development as a filmmaker, with each of the three films more assured than the last.

Life of Pi (2012) is more of a crowdpleaser, and arguably Lee’s biggest as it’s far and away his greatest commercial success. Based on Yann Martel’s bestselling novel of the same name, it’s a strange brew for a blockbuster: the tall tale of an Indian man (Irrfan Khan) who claims to have survived 227 days at sea with a Bengal tiger, Life of Pi is a study in faith and meaning in the face of human suffering, executed as a visual effects spectacular complete with a menagerie of CG critters.

An earlier box office hit of Lee’s, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), might be his purest work of entertainment, a martial arts pic which finds the director breaking from understatement for something more operatic. Featuring flying combatants and twirling sword fights free of any notions of the realism typically found in western action cinema, Crouching Tiger is the finest example in Lee’s filmography of how this filmmaker responsible for such sensitive, deliberate drama can also restyle himself as a formidable action director.

2003’s Hulk is a more flawed attempt by Lee to work in a popular mode, but it’s nonetheless one of his most fascinating films, a Marvel movie with the eccentric stamp of an auteur made before the stylistically uniform age of the MCU. Pitting Dr Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) against the megalomaniacal scientist father (Nick Nolte) whose genetic experiments turn Bruce into a green-skinned titan, Hulk is a comic book adaptation with as much Frankenstein and Greek tragedy in its DNA as graphic novels. No superhero movie, however, comes closer to recreating the actual experience of reading a graphic novel, with Lee crash-zooming into images, employing wipe transitions to suggest the turning of pages and even splitting the frame into panels – bold stylistic choices that all give Hulk the feel of a living comic.

From 2012 to 2019, Lee tested the technological limits of modern cinema via big budget experiments in 3D, increased frame rate and computer-generated imagery. Lee looks back on the period with a certain weariness now – recently declaring the equipment and prep required to make those films “difficult” and the 3D projection of an average cinema “purely bad”, Lee says that for his next feature he’ll return to “the old way of making movies” – though the films that he made in that time are still worth a look.

Cutting-edge bells and whistles aside, Life of Pi is comfortably the most compelling of Lee’s three trials with new tech. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), a drama about a teenage veteran (Joe Alwyn) recalling a difficult tour in Iraq while back home in the States, and Gemini Man (2019), a sci-fi action flick which has a hotshot assassin (Will Smith) going mano-a-mano with a clone of himself (a de-aged Smith), are more underpowered dramatically, but each film benefits from Lee’s increased focus on viewer immersion in its own way. 

While the former conveys the disorientation of a battle-shocked soldier returning home to flag-waving Bush-era Texas – another American milieu carefully rendered by Lee – Gemini Man features kinetic action sequences that are among the director’s best.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon screens as part of The Art of Action season at BFI Southbank.