Ang Lee
US
Of all the films to make their debut on the world stage during this year's festival one of the most eagerly awaited is Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, a poignant, bittersweet, and often hilarious look at one family's American Dream in 1973 and the morning after.
"My producers and I often joked that 1973 was America's most 'embarrassing' year, with Nixon, polyester, the admitting of defeat in Vietnam, stagnation and the energy crisis" says Lee. "But embarrassment can be a profound and enlightening experience. In researching for The Ice Storm, my production team and I read many of the novels and self-help books from the period, and watched many of the movies made in the early 70s. Rather than approach the period as one of 'kitsch', this process led us to a tremendous respect and humility. It turned out that there were many truths buried inside the pop psychology and sometimes painfully naive self-help philosophies of the day, and that we - two decades later - have much to learn from this embarrassing past."
The Taiwanese director first came to attention in 1992 when his first feature, Pushing Hands, screened in the Panorama section of the 1992 Berlin Film Festival. Lee returned to Berlin a year later with The Wedding Banquet, which won the Golden Bear and an Academy Award nomination for best foreign language film.
Lee's third film Yinshi Nanni (Eat Drink, Man Woman), the third part of his 'Father Knows Best' trilogy, opened Directors' Fortnight in 1994 and was also nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign language feature. In 1995, Lee surprised almost everyone by choosing to take on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, a film which received seven Academy Award nominations in 1996, winning an Oscar for Emma Thomp-son's adapted screenplay and a second Golden Bear for the director from Berlin. Now Lee changes his focus from Austen and 19th-century England to a Rick Moody novel and US suburbia circa 1973. A period piece all the same.
"When I read Moody's novel, I knew immediately that I wanted to make it into a film," says Lee. "For me, such a revelation comes through small details and particular moments. In this case, the moment at the end of the novel when Paul is joined at the train station by his family. The power of the novel is to make of this moment no more and no less than what it is. It is an image that has the force of a memory and, for that reason, an image that has more meaning than any theme or story or even emotion can give it."
The Ice Storm, which stars Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci, is set in November 1973. It is a time when the US remains in limbo and when couples like Ben and Elena Wood (Kline and Allen) are feeling the destabilising winds of change from the 60s blowing through their lives and their wealthy suburb. Worried about his chances of promotion, which are receding faster than his hairline, Ben has difficulty in reaching out to Elena for comfort. She herself is clinging onto the last vestiges of the 'American Housewife' and trying her hand at every popular self-help fad that passes her way in an effort to understand the games people play.
Ben is trying to bed his mistress, next-door neighbour Janey Carver (Weaver). Elena is reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull and losing patience with her husband's clumsy lies. All the while their daughter, Wendy (Ricci), is finding new games to play with the boy next door and his little brother. In the meantime, her own brother (Maguire) chooses to escape the city to pursue an alluring rich girl from his prep school.
Night falls and the family set sail on their separate sexual odysseys. An ice storm hits, the worst in 30 years. By the time it has blown over, a family will stand face to face with one another for the very first time.
Christopher Pickard
Prod co: Good Machine
Prods: Ted Hope, James Schamus & Ang Lee
Dir: Ang Lee Scr: James Schamus
Ph: Frederick Elmes
Art dir: Mark Friedberg
Cos: Carol Oditz
Mus: Mychael Danna
Ed: Tim Squyres
Cast: Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire, Sigourney Weaver, Jamey Sheridan
Running time: 113 mins
Int sales: UGC
