The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 105

The Philadelphia Inquirer MOVIE OPENINGS Friday, Sept. 24, 1993 Mothers and daughters bridging a cultural divide 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: (profanity, discreet sexuality, violence) Showing at: Ritz at the Bourse UwjL m.4.U- Yu Fei Hong is in the tast of "The Joy Luck Club.

The film follows four Chinese American women and their immigrant mothers. 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 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. 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. 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 Lucie'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 From diverse black viewpoints, apartheid's violence and agony REVIEW BOPHA! V4 Produced by Lawrence Taubman, directed by Morgan Freeman, written by Brian Bird and John Wierick, photography by David Watkin, music by James Horner, distributed by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours. Micah Mangena Danny Glover Zweli Maynard Eziashi Rosie Mangena Alfre Woodard Captain De Villiers Malcolm McDowell Van Tonder Marius Weyers Parent's guide: PG-13 (violence) Showing at: Sam's Place. 19th and Chestnut Sts. 1 gfV A police career, but the rebellious and restive teenager will have none of it.

Zweli joins the vanguard of student demonstrators who demand their classes be taught in English rather than Afrikaans. Inevitably, this pits son against father, and the natural frictions between generations that are a part of growing up find a new context on the dusty streets of the township. Further, the middle ground Micah seeks to occupy becomes untenable. His neighbors, angry at his collaboration with the enemy, ostracize his wife, Rosie (Alfre Woodard), and threaten his home. Freeman begins this harrowing picture with a graphic execution scene in which a fire suddenly illuminates the darkness.

It comes from a gasoline-soaked tire draped around a black policeman's neck. Should that neck be risked for whites in the hope of making a secure life for one's family in a world filled with poverty and deprivation? Can such a decision be made in a vacuum? Freeman advances these questions without climbing on a soapbox. He realizes the predicament of all three Mangenas needs no highlighting, and the finely drawn performances of Glover, Woodard and Eziashi are in tune with his restraint. Bophal whose title is taken from the Zulu word for arrest, is itself an arresting film that shows how much more can be seen when a director and his cameras take a different tack from what turns out to be the right angle. By Desmond Ryan INQUIRER MOVIE CRITIC Although the victims of apartheid are black, most filmmakers have viewed its outrages from the perspective of conscience-stricken whites.

The approach made artistic if not political sense, since it allowed them to work in the gray area where good drama flourishes. In his riveting directing debut with Bophal, Morgan Freeman has put us in his debt for many reasons. Not the least is that he has found a way to examine apartheid and its awful consequences from black viewpoints. And he has done it within that same gray area of moral ambivalence. As a result, we find ourselves in the same place the slum townships that figured in Cry Freedom and A World Apart but seeing things from a different direction.

Bophal's source is the play by South African writer Percy Mtwa. Mtwa's father was a black South African police officer, and thus in a no-win, man-in-the-middle situation. In Bophal, Mtwa's memories are transformed into a story crammed with agonizing dilemmas that Freeman explores with insight and evenhanded compassion. Master Sgt. Micah Mangena (Danny Glover) is the kind of ramrod noncom that keeps any efficient police force running.

Disciplined in his own life and demanding of the recruits he trains, Mangena is a military stereotype in a position anything but stereotypical. For a black man, he Danny Glover (left), Peter Kampila in Morgan Freeman 's "Bophal" has a good, well-paid job he can rationalize by saying he is simply upholding the law. But it is, of course, an evil law that subjects his own people to brutal repression. The year is 1980 and the township Mangena is supposed to control is seething with unrest. Protest rallies even of schoolchildren are met with tear gas and batons, and the leaders are arrested and tortured by state security agents to make them talk.

Mangena's natural decency has already fueled his misgivings at the excesses of some of his white superiors, when the emotional forces within his own family make the issue intensely and tragically personal. Mangena expects his son Zweli (Maynard Eziashi, who starred in Bruce Beresford's Mister Johnson) to follow him in a More reviews Capsule summaries. Page 4. "The Program." Page 4. "The Good Son." Page 5.

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