Mothers and daughters bridging a cultural divide By Carrie Rickey INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC Don't bother to apply mascara before seeing The Joy Luck Club. It will almost surely dissolve in your tears. And so will you even if you don't wear mascara. This heartrending and transcendent adaptation of Amy Tan's bestseller about a quartet of Chinese American daughters and their immigrant mothers is the ultimate movie about almost everyone's first love: Mom. It is also an extraordinary epic of brimming heart and overflowing humor that explores both sides of that duet, often more intense even than spousal love, the bond between mother and daughter. In the case of our eight heroines, these bonds are more strained than most. For each mother has fled the feudal society of wartime China, a culture of arranged marriages and concubinage, of Japanese occupation and civil unrest, to the democracy of the United States where daughters are not always as obedient as their old-country counterparts. How can these moms, in a language that is not their own, tell their girls what it was like to step out of the middle ages and into the modern world? These adventuresses are medieval serfs and vassals who have time-traveled to modern San Francisco and must struggle with the cultural equivalent of the bends and raise their families. They are warrior women armed with woks for shields and chopsticks for swords. Passionately directed by Wayne Wang, Joy Luck is a symphonically structured affair quite different in its organization, if not in its family-dynamic tone, from his impromptu Dim Sum. With four interlocking stories told in flashback around the mah-jongg table -REVIEW THE JOY LUCK CLUB **** Produced by Wayne Wang, Amy Tan, Ronald Bass and Patrick Markey, directed by Wayne Wang, written by Amy Tan and Ronald Bass, based on the novel by Amy Tan, photography by Amir Mokri, music by Rachel Portman, distributed by Hollywood Pictures. In English and Chinese with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 15 mins. June ..... . Ming-Na Wen Waverly... Tamlyn Tomita Lena. ...Lauren Tom Rose.. Rosalind Chao Suyuan. ........... .......Kieu Chinh Lindo Tsai Chin Ying Ying.. . France Nuyen An Mei. .Lisa Lu Parent's guide: R (profanity, discreet sexuality, violence) Showing at: Ritz at the Bourse where the Joy Luck Club meets weekly, the new film gradually builds to an emotional crescendo that few movies ever try for, let alone achieve. What's great about the screenplay (streamlined from the novel by Tan herself in concert with Ronald Bass, who wrote Rain Man) is its canny shape. Essentially a four-battle war movie where each of the eight adversaries is in the right and knows that change is the only way to peace, Joy Luck's reconciliations are cathartic beyond words. Even more powerful than the reconciliations is each mother's recognition that the personal demons she does not vanquish will remain to haunt her child. There is Suyuan (Kieu Chinh), who abandoned two infants in war-torn China and therefore feels unworthy to be a mother to. Yu Fei Hong is in the cast of "The Joy Chinese American women and their her American daughter, June (Ming-Na Wen), who as a consequence is single and childless. There is Lindo (Tsai Chin, in the most astonishing performance in a film of astonishing performances), who outwitted her inlaws to escape an arranged marriage and has bequeathed to her daughter Waverly (Tamlyn Tomita) her competitive, strategic nature. (Of course Waverly becomes the champion chess child of Chinatown.) There is Ying Ying (France Nuyen, looking more beautiful than she did 30 years ago in The World of Suzie Wong), who avenges herself against an abusive husband by harming their child. She spiritually dies, giving nothing to her American daughter, Lena (Lauren Tom), who in turn has nothing to give her husband. And there is An Mei (Lisa Lu, in a haunting role), who witnessed her concubine mother's submission to her husband and now sees the same pattern reasserting itself with her daughter, Rose (Rosalind Chao), and her spouse. Luck Club." The film follows four immigrant mothers. Instead of offering a glib moral - i.e., mothers have to solve their problems before daughters can resolve their own - Joy Luck beautifully illustrates how each mom does this, including one who stage-manages a reconciliation from beyond the grave. More eloquent than Joy Luck's poetic monologues are its silences. One stern look, one crabbed embrace, the shifting of a morsel from mother's to daughter's plate, says more about disappointment, the pain and joy of love and maternal sacrifice than could the most -florid soliloquy. If the movie has a flaw, it's that of the book: The mothers' stories are grounded in politics and history and those of their daughters are without context. But so glorious is the storytelling, the muted flute music (by Rachel Portman), the cinematography (by Amir Mokri, including some startlingly beautiful sequences in rural China) and - most of all - the honesty of the acting, that the film is pure joy.
