EVERY
PICTURE TELLS
A STORY
Part 1 of 4
(When Will the "Yellow Ceiling" be Raised) Film Review: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Wendi Murdoch/Florence
Sloan-produced film based on Lisa See's book "Snow
Flower and the Secret Fan is dependent on Wayne Wang's creative
ambitions as a story-teller and desire to be known for more
than being a "craftsman" to accurately portray
the book's emotional themes of judgment, betrayal and atonement
within their own “private and forbidden worlds”
in Old China.
BREAKING EXISTING
ENTERTAINMENT "LEGACY CODES"
that
have served as today’s barriers for Chinese films
– along with Asian Pacific American projects - to
achieve success in the United States, Florence Sloan and
Wendi Murdoch wanted to share a story that transcended
any perceived obstacles of a “Yellow Ceiling”
through their film “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.”
. Paving a path of building bridges between the biggest
and fastest growing entertainment markets in the world
requires films by great story-tellers sharing passionate
stories beyond the typical historical epics typically
coming from China - the result of successfully getting
films made and distributed in China. Wendi Murdoch and
Florence Sloan hoped to be among the pioneers of this
movement.
NOTING
"CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON,"
"Hero" and "Fearless" are films that
have achieved success despite being “period pieces”
that American audiences perceive as inaccessible –
films such as Jiang Wen’s “Let the Bullets
Fly” (starring Chou Yun-fat), John Woo’s “Red
Cliff,” Soi Cheang’s “The Monkey King”
(starring Chou Yun-fat) and Feng Xiaogang’s “Aftershock”
have not traveled well to the United States. High profiled
films such as Dayyan Eng’s “Inseparable”
(Kevin Spacey/Daniel Wu), John Cusak/Gong Li/Ken Watanabe’s
“Shanghai,” Sherwood Hu’s “Amazing”
– that is being co-produced by Shanghai
Film Group/NBA, Endgame Entertainment’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt
“Looper” (dramatization of the life of Marco
Polo), RZA/Eli Roth’s “Hand with the Iron
Glove” and others have encountered various obstacles
in getting distributed in the United States. Wendi Murdoch
and Florence Sloan believe that a film based on Lisa See’s
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan – a popular book
that was published in 2005 – with its compelling
universal themes of love, regret, commitment, judgment,
betrayal and atonement – would greatly appeal to
American film-going audiences.
SNOW
FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN'S ORIGINAL STORY
is a historically based account of a close but tumultuous
relationship between two women in rural (Tongkou) Hunan
province that is sustain through decades and marriage,
childbirth, heartbreak, war and death by an oath of friendship.
Paired at age 7 as lifetime companions in 1829, or laotong,
by a matchmaker charged with finding them husbands, Lily
(aka Baihe played by China's Li Bingbing) and Snow Flower
(South Korea's Gianna Jun) – from the “Lu”
clan - are bonded by being born under the same sign, having
their feet bound on the same day and through a secret,
female-only script called Nüshu, in which messages
are written in the folds of a fan. Despite Snow Flower’s
feet providing her a prestigious match while Lily is married
to a lowly butcher (because of her father’s opium
addiction ruining her family’s fortunes, their bonds
continue and survived.
THE
WAYNE WANG-ADDED
secondary "modern story" involves Nina Wei (Shanghai
career girl/bank employee) discovering that her estranged
BFF (Best Friend Forever) - Liao Xuemei, aka Sophia Liao
- was in an accident and in a coma. As a result, discovers
that she was writing a novel about their friendship that
began in high school through sharing common pleasures
such as the music of Faye Wong – with its struggles
with today’s life issues (i.e. Nina’s academic
excellence, the suicide of Sophia’s father, etc.).
The added storyline attempts to connect to the original
tale by sharing that Sophia secretly returned from Sydney
to Shanghai on her own to work on a about her great-great-grandmother
Xuehua, aka Snow Flower.
LAOTONG
(low-tahng) N., Chinese – (Literally “Old
Same”): a lifelong, sworn bond of sisterhood
between two female friends, intended to survive
all the changes of life, including marriage and
childbirth . . . and never to be broken
RECENT
CHINESE MOVIE IMPORTS failed
to connect with American audiences because the storytelling
isn't ambitious were the words spoken by the film’s
director Wayne Wang (“Joy Luck Club” and ‘A
Thousand Years of Good Prayers” – among many
others) and he sought to change that perception in “Snow
Flower and the Secret Fan.” The creative writing
partners in Mr. Wang’s ambitions consisted of Ron
Bass (“Joy Luck Club” and “Snow Falling
in Cedars”), Michael Ray (“A Thousand Years
of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska”)
and Yale School of Drama graduate Angela Workman (“Brontë”
and “War Bride”). Ronald J. Bass’ success
of coordinating stories from a modern and historical perspective(s)
in “Joy Luck Club” – along with his
past projects regarding people speaking/thinking in different
languages (“Rain Man”) and exploring female
relationships (“Waiting to Exhale” and “How
Stella Got Her Groove Back”) made him a key proponent
of expressing Mr. Wang’s vision. Michael K. Ray’s
past projects telling the personal struggles of Chinese
immigrants living in the United States and China brought
additional viewpoints from an American perspective. Angela
Workman’s participation was strategic in communicating
the film’s ambitions. Her passion is noted in her
upcoming project “Brontë” about the three
Brontë sisters emergence from the haven of their
hidden fantasy worlds and unfortunate backgrounds to become
history's most famous authors. The “secret poems”
of Charlotte and Emily Brontë and the process of
condensing intense lives, events and characters while
covering a wide spectrum of cultural, historical and sociological
background appears to be the backbone of the film. One
could envision some similarities between the isolation
suffered by the Brontë sisters and “Sworn Sisters,”
though they differed greatly in scope and length to the
fates suffered by these women such as Yang Huanyi - the
lady that Lisa See met during her extensive research.
It is a daunting task to compare the Brontë sisters’
limited environment to China’s “sworn sisters”
who were totally isolated from the world (initially in
their parent’s home between the ages of seven to
seventeen and from the time they are married to their
deaths) while being virtual prisoners hobbled by their
bound feet and illiterate in the writings of men that
resulted in writing nüshu works (aka "third
day missives") to be delivered to their counterparts
on the third day after the young woman's marriage to express
their hopes of happiness and sorrows for being parted
from her.
WAYNE
WANG 'S VISUAL VISION
Wang
began by dividing the film into two diametrically
opposed sets of aesthetics. “For the period
sections of the film, when we are in 19th Century
Pu Wei, I wanted the scenes to look like frames
of paintings. We looked at a lot of 19th Century
art from China and around the world to come up with
a feeling that would be very colorful and richly
textured, almost like Rembrandts.” He goes
on: “Then, for the contemporary scenes, we
made a great contrast. The colors are all very cool,
with grey walls and pale clothing, and there’s
lot of fluid camera motion. For the 90s, we went
for more of a Technicolor look, more dream-like
and stylized.”
WAYNE
WANG
He
was born and raised in Hong Kong, and moved to Los
Altos, California in 1967. For two years he lived
on a radical Quaker ranch, doing chores in exchange
for rent, and attending college nearby. Then he
decided to study film production at the California
College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, an education
he augmented by avidly watching the films of the
French New Wave, German New Cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi,
Yasujiro Ozu, and Satyajit Ray.
He
later returned to Hong Kong and got a job directing
a popular television series, BELOW THE LION ROCK,
for RTHK-TV (the Hong Kong equivalent of PBS) but
he found that he did not fit into the traditionalist
system and returned to the U.S. where he got involved
with the Asian American community in the Bay Area.
In
1982, with grants from the National Endowment for
the Arts and the American Film Institute, Wang made
CHAN IS MISSING, in which two cabbies search through
San Francisco’s Chinatown for the mysterious
Chan, a man who’s made off with their hard-earned
dough. “Although the character of Chan is
never seen through the film,” says Wang, “I
must have identified with him. He’s a resident
of Chinatown but he’s missing. He belongs
there but he’s an outsider at the same time.”
Wang also wanted to show another Chinatown –
the one behind the scenes with its temperamental
chefs and internal politics that have more to do
with the divide between Taiwan and China than triads.
“Unlike Hollywood filmmakers, I didn’t
use Chinatown as a signifier of mysterious Oriental
doom,” he says. “I took my characters
and audience into its very real streets.”
Wang
is often identified with films about the Chinese
Diaspora, including the film adaptation of THE JOY
LUCK CLUB. However, he has also made such independent
features as SMOKE and BLUE IN THE FACE, both starring
Harvey Keitel and set in Brooklyn, and the romantic
comedy MAID IN MANHATTAN starring Jennifer Lopez.
At the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival,
Wang premiered two feature films, A THOUSAND YEARS
OF GOOD PRAYERS and THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA, and
he also appeared in Arthur Dong’s documentary
film HOLLYWOOD CHINESE. Wang won the Golden Shell
for Best Film at the 2007 San Sebastian Film Festival
for A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS.
He
is married to former actress Cora Miao, who appeared
in three of his films, DIM SUM, EAT A BOWL OF TEA
AND LIFE IS CHEAP… BUT TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE.
They live in San Francisco and New York City.
WAYNE
WANG'S AMBITIONS,
need to avoid the "craftsman" label and eclectic
thirst for invention (i.e.”Smoke Blue in the Face”
and “The Center of the Earth” – along
with the indie production of "Life Is Cheap ... but
Toilet Paper Is Expensive") was integrated within
his presentation of Lisa See’s book by including
the creation/invention of a parallel “modern”
storyline by his writers. His belief that the “Sworn
Sisters” from China’s Shanghai in the 21st
century and laotongs from the rural Northern Jiangyong
County (formerly Yong Ming County) of Hunan province during
the early 19th century share common commitments and obstacles
seems to be an extension of his words to be a “filmmaker
straddling different cultures . . . trying to make films
that appeal to all audiences.” With the \two main
female characters of both stories played by the same two
actresses, the film asks audiences to believe that life
for women in China’s most “Westernized”
city of today’s Shanghai has many of the cultural
long-embedded sex-segregated cultural restrictions of
their counterparts in rural China during the 19th century
that led them to create a "Dong language" (aka
“Nüshu”) – even though nüshu
nearly became extinct as the primary reasons that women
used it disappeared (desire of establishing very deep
and meaningful friendship based on love – along
with suffering, loneliness and companionship that couldn’t
share to anybody else) especially in today’s Internet
Age. As Lisa See shared “Young women today no longer
need to learn Nüshu as part of a deeply embedded
social custom and survival tool. Their feet aren't bound,
they're literate, and they work outside the home where
they can meet their friends. Nowadays, young women learn
the language as one might learn a national dance or a
folksong. They're preserving and honoring the past, but
it has no direct meaning to or purpose in their lives.”
With Lisa See’s book embedded within an intimate
knowledge of history and an appreciation of the cultural
underpinnings that served as the foundation for understanding
the unusually deep and long-standing emotional commitments
between two females, along with producers Florence Sloan
and Wendi Murdoch’s words “We wanted to be
true to the book” – it was an interesting
decision to work with a director who stated “I’m
not a real period person because it takes such painful
detail.”