[This is a translation from the Chinese newspaper Wenhuibao online, posted December 1, 2006, 09:04:22. Byline: reporter Liu Qing]
During a break in the filming of "Lust, Caution," Joan Chen [Chen Chong] met with this reporter in a metropolitan Shanghai film studio. While she is, after all, a mother of two with small laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, she still has a radiant smile. When a group of young people visiting the studio called out to her, "Sister Chong," she flashed that smile and stopped for a brief visit with everyone. As a film editor admiringly put it, when she meets someone, her eyes light up like no one else's.
Afterwards, as we rode out to the suburbs together, we talked of her growth as an actress and director. Dusk was setting in outside, but I could still see that her eyes shone with the radiance I had seen earlier. In her many years of living in dissolute America, she has had countless experiences, and while one might think these would affect her profoundly, her character is still the same as so many she has portrayed in recent years, someone who knows that "the sun will come up as it always has," a person filled with vitality, someone unceasingly seeking glory and happiness in life.
14 Years Late in Working With Ang Lee
It didn't start with "Lust, Caution." Joan Chen laughingly pointed out that her collaboration with Ang Lee came more than 10 years late. "We both know that when he wrote the script for 'The Wedding Banquet,' he created the part of the young woman with me in mind; but later, for reasons that had to do with the investors, we missed out. So many years have flashed by, but now we can say the dream has come true."
In the original "Lust, Caution" story, Mrs. Yi was a less well-defined character, and in Mr. Yi's involvement with Wang Jiazhi, she doesn't show up at all. But if the role was merely that of someone in a cheongsam (qipao), playing mahjong and presenting the lofty air of a government official's wife, there is no way Joan Chen would have accepted it. So when Ang Lee called Chen and asked her to take the part of Mrs. Yi, she responded with just one question: "Is Mrs. Yi aware of everything that's going on?" When Ang Lee told her that in his script, she knows, "I said I would definitely take the part."
Chen disclosed that in the film, Mrs. Yi understands the complex relationship between her husband and Jiazhi, and when she also realizes the radical student intends to assassinate Mr. Yi, as well as control many things behind the scenes, Mrs. Yi passively connives in the plot. "This woman's thinking is very subtle. Besides that, I am very curious about the people of that era and their relationship with their times, so this role had a great deal of interest for me."
Although Joan Chen's role in the film is not a large one, she is by no means limited to just a few lines.
As for Ang Lee, she said what she admired most was his daring. "The story is such that it almost defies adaptation, but not only did he do it, his script is the most well-developed and closest to Eileen Chang's original artistic conception of any adaptation to date. [Chang] once wrote in reviewing a Yan Geling novel that "going into great detail on the particulars of a novel actually performs an intellectual service by prodding the reader to think about what is being read. Ang Lee's script does that for me."
Of her co-actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, she couldn't help heaving a sigh and saying in her native Shanghai dialect, "he's really sharp. He's says so much with his eyes, then waits for you to respond." Regarding the film's young co-stars Tang Wei and Wang Lihong, she said "they're both really cute. Tang has a round face, and when she smiles her eyebrows curve upward, and she is very attractive, like the beautiful girl in a cigarette ad you see a lot right now."
Has Abandoned "Fusang"
When Joan Chen came to Shanghai for the filming of "Lust, Caution," her old friend Yan Geling* [aka Geling Yan] flew over to stay with her, keep her company on the set, and discuss the day's shooting during the ride back home. But when the two close friends take an evening stroll around the city, it is difficult to avoid the topic of adapting Yan's novel "Fusang" [aka "The Lost Daughter of Happiness"]. Chen first expressed interest in making a film version of "Fusang" about five or six years ago, but working during these years with a succession of other directors in "Jasmine Women," "Sunflower," "The Sun Will Rise Again," and now "Lust, Caution," has delayed making her own film all this time.
When I mentioned this, Joan Chen sighed, and said that she has abandoned "Fusang."
The novel "Fusang" inspired in Chen a great enthusiasm for making a film version, "This woman Fusang was so special. She was clearly so unlucky, but she bore up with so many misfortunes. Disaster after disaster came at her like an iron fist striking at cotton, but she quietly bore and resolved all of them!" Joan Chen believes that women like this appear less and less in movies, and "how can they only show docile women who lack the power to take any action on their own?" This holds the fascination of a challenge for her. "While I was positioned to throw myself into the project then, it was just at that time that I had my second child," and the baby steadily drew her away from all the necessary preparation work. "When the drive to do something has passed, it is hard to get that feeling back again. I no longer have in my heart that earlier feeling that 'this is something I must do.' Even if I were to reinvest myself in the preparation work for filming 'Fusang,' this time it wouldn't be the same movie I had in mind back then."
When asked about her future plans after filming "Lust, Caution," Joan Chen laughed and said, "Whether I'm acting or directing, in the course of finding out I will always follow the call of my heart."
*Shanghai-born Chinese-American writer.
