CINEMA: LEFT OUT IN THE COLD

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"This movie is about uncomfortableness," Lee says. "Whatever you do is somehow wrong. So the actors could not feel self-assured about their performing. It's not about performing; it's about people being observed in an uncomfortable situation." The viewer should feel the same way. A squirming sympathy is the only proper reaction to the clumsiness of the parents' attempts to connect with their kids, like Ben's solemn advice to his son on masturbation ("Don't do it in the shower"). Yet the film's lesson is that, God help us and them, we are our parents. The kids and their folks share all kinds of little sins, from shoplifting to casual sex to peeking in a neighbor's medicine cabinet. Home, the film says, is a school where we mostly learn bad habits.

When the local hippie minister makes a mildly suggestive remark to Elena, she says, "I'm going to try hard not to understand the implications of that." That is the cardinal rule here: Don't ask, don't dwell. One of the chilliest moments in The Ice Storm comes in an edgy scene where Ben tells Elena, "I guess we're just on the verge of saying something--saying something to each other." Saying something harsh and truthful would be a breaking of the code, of the lies that sustain their marriage and keep it arid.

Lee's exquisitely watchful face may suggest a softness of temperament. Don't be fooled: he knows what he wants. "I like to communicate in a civilized way, if my English can accommodate it," says Lee, who came to the U.S. for college in 1978 and has lived here ever since. "Sometimes my English is a little brutal. But that's all right. I get understood."

The grace of an Ang Lee film is in his avoidance of the gaucheries his characters cannot escape. He calls this "a costume drama," but doesn't push the period. "I haven't seen the '70s treated realistically. Most films mock the '70s. But it's both period and very fresh in our memory. That ambiguity fascinated me."

And of course Lee will not pass draconian judgments on his sweet, sad characters. "My Oriental upbringing made me bring sympathy to them," he says. "It also gave me the fear of nature, fear and respect for something bigger than life, something unknown that you can't control." He could mean not just the ice storm in his delicately devastating film, but the wayward impulses that rage in every human heart.

--Reported by William Tynan/New York