The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 81

movies alJ iiJ MJ' 'fi The compelling tale of mothers and daughters crosses generations and cultures. By Jay Boyar SENTMEL MOVE CfVTIC mM cnotw tha ctnrv nf Tho lwi ft the story of The Joy iece by piece, scene by scene, Luck Club is set before us 1 Ying Ying (Yu Fei Hong) is an oppressed woman whose tragic life shapes the destiny of the next 2 generations of her family. REVIEW iky i i irfi iitf i urn PHOTOSBUENA VISTA PICTURES onscreen. Adapted from Amy Tan's acclaimed best seller, this engrossing film is a story of many stories, a mosaic made up of the lives of four mothers and their four grown-up daughters, lives that represent two very different worlds. The mothers, who were raised in China, come from a harsh world in which terrifying incidents seem almost commonplace.

Elaborate ancient customs sometimes conceal a hideous cruelty in the wild landscape of the old world a landscape that includes such horrors as suicide and even infanticide. By contrast, the world of the daughters is less openly violent In the movie's relatively modern San Francisco, the body is safer but the soul retains a touching vulnerability. Working with co-executive producer Oliver Stone and from a script by Tan and Ronald Bass (Rain Man), director Wayne Wang (Dim Sum, Chan Is Miss- Suyuan (Kieu Chinh) is forced to abandon her infant daughters while fleeing the Japanese. 'The Joy Luck Club' Cast: Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn To-mita, Lauren Tom, Rosalind Chao, Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, Lisa Lu. Director Wayne Wang.

Screenwriters: Amy Tan, Ronald Bass. Cinematographer Amir Mokri. Music: Rachel Portman. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes. Industry rating: (restricted).

Parents' guide: Adult situations, language. Reviewing key. excellent, good, average, poor, awful enough in the way he and the screenwriters weave the movie's many tales together, letting each comment on the next and on the next. And there is subtlety, too, in Amir Mokri's cinematography, whose powerfully delicate images create worlds within worlds within worlds. The title of the film (which opens today in Central Florida) refers to an organization of the four older women, who meet each week to play mah-jongg.

Four months before the movie begins, Suyuan (Kieu Chinh), the founder of the club, died. Early in the film, the others ask her daughter, June (Ming-Na Wen), to sit in for her, thus initiating a flurry of cross-generational storytelling and soul-searching. ing) discovers a link between these worlds, an urgent connection from one generation to the next In presenting this material, the director is far from subtle. His characters, in fact, are apt to voice their heartaches with fortune-cookie clarity. But the stylized old-new setting that Wang creates seems to demand this sort of directness.

Besides, there is subtlety Strained mother-daughter bond inspires literary life By Hillel Italie ASSOCIATED PRESS because of a weekly mah-jongg game the mothers started in China and picked up again in California after World War II. Tan collaborated on the film's screenplay with fiain Man writer Ron Bass, co-produced the film and even makes a cameo appearance in the first scene. Wayne Wang, whose other works include Slamdance and Eat a Botol of Tea, directed. The Joy Luck Club contrasts women from an old world of too many rules with women from a new world of perhaps too few. For the mothers, there are memories of oppression, arranged marriages, family disgrace.

The Americanized daughters live with vaguer but still persistent problems of uncertain identities and the burdens of achieving what their mothers couldn't Interviewed recently at a Manhattan hotel, Tan wears her divided souls, literally, on See TfiMf Page 8 If Tan was destined to lose this race against herself, the consolation prize couldn't have been more rewarding. Stubbornness, we'll call it persistence, has made her famous. Over the past four years, she has written two widely acclaimed, widely read novels that spare nothing in her examination of mother-daughter relationships, especially her own. When she came out with her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, some wondered who would read a book by a Chinese-American writer? The question now is: Who wouldn't? Her books appeal to mothers, daughters, immigrants, children of immigrants, married couples, survivors of war or just about anyone who has endured some kind of heartbreak or disappointment The Joy Luck Club, now a feature film, tells of a tense but close community of young, Americanized- professionals- and their Chinese mothers. All know each other is I I I NEW YORK She was 35 when she knew the game was over.

It was the day Amy Tan looked in the mirror and discovered, yes, she had turned out a lot like her mother. "I have a quality that can be described as either persistence or stubbornness," the 41-year-old author said with a shy but firm smile. "I don't let go of it, and it drives me crazy that my mother can't let go of something. She can't let go of something that either bothers her or she wants very much. "It's a reverence for something especially having to do with pain, a need to make somebody close to you understand.

My husband points it out to me. Hell tell me, You sound just like your mother when you say that' And HI say, 'How can you say that to ASSOCIATED PRESS After a rebellious youth, Amy Tan embraced her roots..