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THE ARTS
APRIL 5, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 13
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She studied filmmaking at California State University at Northridge and then--lightning strikes again--was seen crossing a parking lot by mogul Dino De Laurentiis. Instantly, she had the lead Asian role in his 1985 TV saga, Tai-Pan. For more than a decade, Chen was excellent in good movies and amusing in bad ones. In Clara Law's Hong Kong-made Temptation of a Monk, Chen sings, does a cute cootch, gets acupunctured and has her head shaved--it's a charismatic turn. In Stanley Kwan's Red Rose, White Rose she is a figure of eros and pathos, playing pensive airs at the piano and driving her lover quietly nuts with her desperate vitality; the turn won her a Hong Kong Film Critics award. Back in the West, in Judge Dredd and Seagal's On Deadly Ground, she was just fabulous-looking furniture.
Her verdict on those two cinematrocities: "The sad thing is, they weren't the worst films I did." Chen may be thinking of Wild Side, a fascinating mess in which she took a three-minute nude roll in the sheets with Heche, who later declared herself a lesbian. "Before me, she was with boys," Chen says roguishly. "After me she came out. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding!"
Chen wasn't kidding about her unease over her career. "I have delicate, sensitive nerves, but I don't look delicate and sensitive--my physique forbids it. I did my best to give a version of Chinese-ness that the West was looking for. I understood that they would only accept certain versions of me, which I played up to. But I also understood that that version of me was worthless." Yan recalls that after a bad film experience Chen would "bang her head against the wall. We'd talk about her trying to go to medical school or do a law degree. But I always said, 'Bullshit, you'll forget it all tomorrow.' And of course she always did."
Yan rescued her friend with Tian Yu, a novel that stirred in Chen both a memory of the Cultural Revolution and a long-deferred desire to direct. Chen could have shot her film in the familiar cocoon of a movie studio. But to be faithful to Xiu Xiu's story meant filming it on the remote Tibetan steppes. "The location was 4,000 m high," Chen says. "It was hard to breathe. We didn't take showers for a month. We were all sniffing each other. Lunch on the set was always late and cold. Or it wouldn't arrive. So we ate yak meat, yak meat, yak meat. And lots of yak meat."
As a first-time director, Chen says, "At times I felt like the captain of the Titanic." Chen may also have felt like Xiu Xiu: both abandoned by the government hierarchy and subject to its whim. "We were working without a permit. Every day we worried that our equipment would be confiscated and that the film negative would never get out of China. But fortunately nobody came to look for us."
The few faxes Chen sent home, to her cardiologist husband Peter Hui in San Francisco, "showed how neurotic I was, how scared." But unlike Xiu Xiu, Chen chose these conditions; she sent herself down. "Once I started filming I didn't mind the hardship," she says, "because that's the romantic part of it. You endure for a few months, then you go home."
There were also the fleeting epiphanies. "One day," Chen recalls, "it started raining. We got on the bus, and everyone was so tired, they dozed off. Except for me; I'm an insomniac. I was listening to Rachmaninoff and staring out the window. The black clouds were rolling, but at the end of the horizon a strip of blue showed up, then a rainbow. It was very intense--strong and beautiful, like a gate to heaven. I woke everybody up, and we got it in the movie. So seldom do you see beauty face to face. It was all worth it for that one day."
The Chinese censors and their 10% fine be damned. With her sad, beautiful film, Chen may not have a pot of gold, but she has a rainbow.
Reported by Isabella Ng and Stephen Short/Hong Kong
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