This article appeared in a special February 7, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)

After the critical and commercial disappointment of Hulk (2003), Ang Lee’s melancholic take on the green Marvel monster, the director sank into a depression and nearly retired from filmmaking. To his surprise, his father encouraged him to return to it. “He told me to just put on my helmet and keep on going,” Lee said of his father, who died two weeks after their conversation in 2004. “That was the very first time he encouraged me to make a movie.” Until then, Lee’s father, the principal of a prestigious high school in Taiwan, had only ever disapproved of his son’s passion for theater and film. Maybe this partly explains why Lee did not release a feature film until he was 37, after he had emigrated to the United States and become a father himself.

The presence of Lee’s father can be felt throughout his work. In Lee’s early “Father Knows Best” trilogy, conservative patriarchs—all of them played by veteran Taiwanese soap actor Lung Sihung—attempt to push their children into the modern world, often against their desires. In Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Zhu, a chef, refuses to allow his middle daughter into the kitchen, so she works in a corporate office. The Americanized sons of Pushing Hands (1991) and The Wedding Banquet (1993) strain to accommodate the arrival of their Chinese dads. Along with Lee’s father, Lung was part of the generation that, in the midst of civil war, had followed Chiang Kai-shek from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. Their expectation of returning in a few years was consistently deferred, and to date there has been no resolution to the political deadlock between the two countries. Lee has called this the “lost generation”—men and women stuck in this historical juncture, unable to move forward or back. (“Lost generation” has also been used to describe the disaffected yuppies of his 1997 drama The Ice Storm, set in the 1970s.)

All of Lee’s films—spanning four decades, from his debut feature, Pushing Hands, about an elderly tai chi master who moves in with family in suburban New York, to his latest, the high-concept Will Smith action vehicle Gemini Man (2019)—are screening in an upcoming retrospective at New York City’s Asia Society, running February 14 to 23. Lee is something of a national hero in Taiwan, and his films have special meaning for those of us who have close ties to the region. Sense and Sensibility (1995), Lee’s Jane Austen adaptation starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, was the first of his films that I saw, and it baffled my teenage self: how could someone who looked like me have made something so… English?

His films were uncannily adept at tapping into different aspects of my immigrant family life. For instance, just like in Pushing Hands, an elder from Taiwan came to live in our suburban American home in the mid-’90s. My grandmother was very much like the father in that film: she spent her days practicing tai chi and refused to learn English, a language barrier that limited our communication to the infantile Mandarin I could muster. Watching The Wedding Banquet, I recoiled at impossible family expectations, and at well-intentioned white friends who wondered why we didn’t just talk to our parents—as if a culture of silence that had endured for centuries could simply vanish once we were on American soil. Lee, it seemed, intimately knew both my frustration with my family and my simultaneous desire to protect them from a world that profoundly misunderstood them. With the same ear, I could hear Margaret’s (Myriam François) impassioned outburst in Sense and Sensibility—“We never talk about things!”—and Alex’s (Wang Bo-zhao) equally exasperated, “My father is a part of me; why can’t you accept that?” in Pushing Hands.

In many parts of Asia, love is expressed indirectly, whether through food, loyalty, or unwanted wedding receptions. Sometimes, as difficult as it may be for a Western audience to accept, not speaking is an act of love. It’s not part of traditional Chinese culture, but I think making a movie can also be a way of expressing one’s heart. I suspect Lee has, in his own in-between way, honored his father the best way he can, through his cinema. But one needn’t be the child of taciturn Chinese immigrants to feel the depth of longing in Lee’s films. Who does not know the desire to be heard, and the fear of rejection that comes with it?

In Lee’s films, displaced elders cling to the old ways—tai chi, calligraphy, and so, so much food. These scenarios may be familiar to cinephiles from the films of Edward Yang, who was also concerned with generational rifts in a rapidly industrializing Taiwan, but Lee pays special attention to the parents of these families, directing his camera to linger on their actions. I am convinced Lung was a master chef in real life, so expertly does he slice his peppers on screen. The actor, who also played the grandfatherly Sir Te in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), is a stern and obstinate presence in his roles. Even when menaced by Chinatown thugs (Pushing Hands) or hobbled by a stroke (The Wedding Banquet), he is possessed of unshakeable dignity, as certain as his ever-present moustache. He is also surprisingly tender, especially with young children: in Eat Drink Man Woman, for instance, he prepares elaborate box lunches for little Shan-Shan (Tang Yu-chien), whose busy single mother overcooks her fish. In such moments, his eyes are disarmingly soft.

With 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, Lee moved squarely into Hollywood co-productions. The frame enlarged to the English countryside, the Forbidden City at its imperial height (Crouching Tiger), and a bioluminescent sea (Life of Pi, 2012), but the focus did not change. Fathers continued to preoccupy Lee: sometimes decent, sometimes cruel, but always distant. Some, like Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) in The Ice Storm and Jake Teichberg (Henry Goodman) in Taking Woodstock (2009), make a belated effort to connect with their children. Quite a few die during the course of the film (Sense and Sensibility, Ride with the Devil [1999], Life of Pi), or have already passed before the story begins (Crouching Tiger). Some are plain evil, like Ennis Del Mar’s homophobic father in Brokeback Mountain (2005), or the literal monster that David Banner (Nick Nolte) becomes in Hulk. In that movie, David recklessly uses himself as a test subject in his genetic research, then accidentally passes along his mutation to his unborn son, Bruce. He is both horrified and curious to see what happens. “WHAT HAS BEEN PASSED ON?” reads a scribbled entry in his notebook. The question could be posed to any of Lee’s fathers. Gemini Man takes the idea of surrogacy to a new and hyperreal level (the film was shot using an ultra-high frame rate of 120 frames per second), pitting sharpshooter Henry (Will Smith) against younger clones of himself. These include Junior, a twentysomething super-soldier (also played by Smith) raised by his commander (Clive Owen), whom he dutifully calls “Pop.”

In Lee’s films, what seems to be about culture is a condition of the family, and vice versa. The two are so merged that they cannot be disentangled. Fathers set the horizon for their children’s futures, whether to rebel against or to fulfill. The most tragic illustration of this comes from Brokeback Mountain: Ennis (Heath Ledger) tells his lover Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) about his childhood encounter with the bloodied bodies of two men suspected of being gay. “My dad, he made sure me and my brother saw it. For all I know, he did it.” Though his father has been dead for years, the adult Ennis continues to hide his feelings, retreating into violence and isolation. We know his heart to be as vast as the mountain on which he once knew happiness, but even that magnificent landscape eventually recedes under the shadow of the father, its image shrunk to the size of a postcard.

Because Lee is from Taiwan, his career is discussed differently from those of other Hollywood directors, even fellow émigré filmmakers with similarly wide ranges, like Michael Curtiz or Billy Wilder. This usually plays out in one of two ways. The first is the essentialist position, which sees Chinese traits in all of Lee’s films, and qualifies him as a great Asian director. (The racist version of this is the stereotype that Asians are good imitators, but lack creative integrity of their own.) The second is the assimilationist position, which values narratives of cross-cultural reconciliation. In this telling, Lee becomes an exemplar of Asian-American cinema, and his hybridity is taken as an affirmation of a pluralistic, liberal worldview.

In reality, Lee fits neither of these models. Though he has lived his adult life in the United States, he has never sought citizenship. Like the characters in his films—and like his own father—he is someone who resides in an unsettled place, between past and present, there and here, father and son. Speaking about Life of Pi, in which a teenage boy spends many months on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean following a terrible shipwreck, Lee remarked in 2013: “Taiwan is like my floating island. It is an island that’s not recognized as a country; it doesn’t have a definite identity. It’s a very special political situation there: everything’s undecided. Floating. It’s an island, it’s oceanic and I’ve been adrift, floating like Pi, all my life.”

Genevieve Yue is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School, and the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (Fordham University Press, 2020).