ANG LEE: PUSHING HANDS (1992) / LIFE OF PI (2012)
Unlike Alfonso Cuarón, Ang Lee’s first major film was not made for his native Chinese cinema – but it is very much a reflection of his own personal experience of living between two cultures that are so fundamentally different. Part one of a sort of trilogy (collectively titled ‘Father Knows Best’) on this theme of clashing values, Pushing Hands is a gentle film, mainly because of the inherent gentleness of the central character – an elderly Chinese man who has recently moved from Peking to New York to live with his son, less-than-impressed daughter in law, and grandson. Although he is a professor of Tai Chi (his mastery of which makes Rocky just look as though he’s trying too hard), the barriers of language and tradition keep him isolated at home, and from wider American society.
With the skilful drama of the Father Knows Best trilogy behind him, Lee made an effortless transition to Hollywood with Sense and Sensibility and proceeded to develop one of the most interesting and diverse filmographies of anyone on this list, wending his way through martial arts, Marvel, and controversy to arrive at his decision to attempt Life of Pi. It is this enormous variation that makes it so interesting to look at his bookend films. Pushing Hands is slow and often dimly lit, while Life of Pi is – in a neat reflection of its title – almost literally alive in its vibrant colour and beautiful delicate detail. Pushing Hands is as realistic and as natural as movies come, but Life of Pi is a story that even the writer of the original book only suggests might have happened.
But as visually sublime as Life of Pi is, its technological achievements are not at its core.
Lee’s clever mixing of voice-over with dialogue and the humour in some of the sequences certainly demonstrate his scope for keeping an audience’s attention – but there is something much more than that happening here. Pi himself states during the movie that without the tiger, Richard Parker, he himself would have died. That is, Pi’s survival eventually came to rest on his heart, his faith in his traditions and his loyalty to his values even in the face of outright hostility. The connection may not be immediately obvious, but when the two films are taken together – with nothing in-between – it feels perfectly possible to draw the parallel that whether boy and tiger, or elderly man and angry western society, both films are really just about how to make it through the necessary minutiae of every-day life, in a difficult environment.
