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Features
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Suffocating in SoCal
For most of her 20’s, Chinese actress Joan Chen was miserable living within the entertainment environs of Los Angeles. Then, she moved.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Proudly a northern Californian
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When Joan Chen first came to Los Angeles, she knew that starting a stateside acting career would be difficult; as an immigrant, she did not expect the range of parts afforded Americans. But what really shocked her was that even after The Last Emperor opened to critical raves and went on to win nine Oscars, including Best Picture, she still had trouble finding work.
"There were no good scripts that followed; I couldn't have a good part after,” Chen recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. “It's because people don't know how to write for me, that's just the way it is."
Living in an industry town like Los Angeles only exacerbated her distress. "From the age of 20 to 30, looking back, I was kind of miserable, anxious all the time, a lot of tension," she observes. "There was a lot of unhappiness. It's amazing looking back at the photos of myself back then, this is a beautiful girl. I look at her as if she's somebody else, it's so long ago."
But, reveals Chen, the day she left Los Angeles to get married to her husband in San Francisco, she calmed down. “What a relief,” she says. “That's when my happiness began."
Down south, she says, she was always insecure and anxious, feeling as if nothing she did was good enough. "I think I wouldn't have gone into directing or writing scripts if I stayed in L.A. It was too much of a vibration."
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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First-time filmmaker Wu
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Chen’s latest film, new this week on DVD, is the romantic comedy Saving Face. Produced by Will Smith with partner Teddy Zee, it tells the story of a lesbian woman (Michelle Krusiec) whose desire to remain in the closet is complicated by a new girlfriend (Lynn Chen) who wants to push her out and a mother (Joan Chen) who suddenly appearance on their doorstep. It seems Ma has also been keeping secrets and her own parents have thrown her out over the shame she has brought on the family. After playing in art houses over the spring and summer, this effervescent indie now enters the DVD market with the hope that it will connect with a much wider audience.
Saving Face represents something of a comeback for Chen. Following The Last Emperor and TV’s Twin Peaks, she co-wrote and directed the 1998 feature Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, a U.S.-Taiwan-Hong Kong co-production that opened to critical acclaim, won a slew of festival prizes, and earned Chen an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature. But that same year, the San Francisco resident gave birth to the first of two daughters. She directed one more feature, 2000's Autumn in New York while acting only sporadically.
By the time Alice Wu's screenplay came across Chen’s desk, the actress had not appeared on screen since 2000's What's Cooking?; initially, she was far from convinced that Saving Face was the right comeback vehicle. "When I first started reading it, the first couple of pages, I said, you know, 'Boring, boring.' It's, like, Amy Tan has done it so well, the Chinese mother and the American daughter," she reveals.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Lynn Chen (no relation)
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But she decided that she at least owed Wu the respect of her full attention, so she continued to read. She remembers, "After a couple of pages, I started to really be delighted, 'cause it sort of turned the stereotype on its head. This mother is not that Chinese mother in Amy Tan's story. She's completely different and I found myself laughing out loud when I was reading it and it moved me to tears."
Chen is grateful to Wu for putting her back in front of the cameras. "I love to get direction," she explains. "Especially because she knows the material well and it's such a relief to just sit back and enjoy it. "You don't have to worry about any other departments, just act. Sometimes, I feel amused, just observing the set and thinking, 'What would I do at this moment?' Play it out in my own head, what choices would I make?"
For her part, Wu initially dismissed any thoughts of casting the youthful and beautiful Joan Chen as Ma. But since the actress loved the script, Wu agreed to meet her. "I still thought she was too – it wasn't that she was too young, she was too beautiful," Wu tells FilmStew.
"[It was] a certain kind of beauty,” she continues. “She has a very young beauty and I needed the mother at the start of the film, it could not be like, ‘Wow! That's mom raring to go!’ It's got to be, ‘OK, that's a woman for whom most of the major decisions in her life have already been made.’
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Michelle Krusiec
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The two met a second time and that is when Wu realized that as effortlessly glamorous as the 44-year-old Shanghai native is in real life, she also possessed the talent and insight to put herself into the skin of this repressed woman used to living completely under the radar. And so, Chen got the part in Saving Face of Ma to Michelle Krusiec's doctor daughter Wil.
At 48, the character is older than Chen and already the mother of an adult daughter, but the biggest difficulty for Chen was connecting with Ma's relative lack of sophistication. Chen describes her own family background as ‘very atypical’ of Chinese families. Her parents and grandparents are doctors, she was raised in the urban environment of Shanghai, and left China at 20.
But while Ma has also immigrated to the United States, she has not embraced her new country. "She is reluctant to enter American culture and she's very stubborn," observes Chen.
As dissimilar as they are, Chen notes one thing they have in common: both are Chinese mothers of American daughters. Unlike Ma, Chen speaks English with her girls, but she has come to understand that there is still a certain cultural gap.
"I can project into the future and see," she laughs. "I didn't realize how, you know, how completely different [they're] going to be from me. When [my older daughter] came home last Thanksgiving, singing 'America the Beautiful' and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, I realized she's going to be American. She is American. I didn't grow up that way and I know there will be some kind of a cultural conflict between Angela, my daughter, and me, and my younger daughter, too. So it amuses me."
While Saving Face has given Chen the chance to contemplate her own life, it also signaled her readiness to return to work. It was only the first of a half-dozen films that include several Asian productions, as well as the upcoming U.S. indie Americanese and an announced Australian feature, The Home Song Stories. It is a lot of work in a short period time, but Chen knows from experience that opportunities can vanish as quickly as they arrive.
As much as she is enjoying her return to acting, Chen admits what she would really like to do is direct. She had two very different experiences in making Xiu Xiu, her first feature, and the second, the studio-driven romance Autumn in New York. The first she describes as physically draining, but exhilarating and a real learning experience on everything from fundraising to becoming educated on the ins and outs of postproduction.
| The critically lambasted and Razzie-nominated (for worst screen couple of Richard Gere and Winona Ryder) Autumn in New York provided Chen a different kind of education, disheartening at the time, but ultimately valuable. "On the second directing job, it was a learning process in how to deal with the studios and I wasn't smart at all," she sighs. "Now I've learned how to be more productive and get the best out of it instead of being so combative.”
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“You don't get any creative freedom, but at the same time, you can, if you learn how to operate…” she adds. “That experience was a lesson for me. So, hopefully, after these two movies, the next time, it'll be a better movie that I make."
Chen admits she misses directing and telling a good story, but she is realistic. It is a job that takes a lot of time and, with two children under eight at home, she does not feel it would be fair to them. So for now, she is writing scripts for movies she hopes to make when the kids are bit older and focusing the rest of her creative energy on acting.
"I love being a director," she exclaims. "I love film. I love everything about the film business. I love to sit right next to the projector and watch the movie with the click-click-click on. I love everything about it."
| And if she has reached the stage of her life where she will be asked to play more characters like Ma, Chen does not mind. She appreciates middle age, as she smiles, "You get a perspective on life, on what makes you happy. It takes such learning, that's the one good thing that comes with wrinkles. You learn, you know, how to be happy." |
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