A Chinese Director Makes Her Mark in Australia

Law has produced a remarkably varied body of work, which ranges from the realistic to the mythic and includes such films as Farewell China and Temptation of a Monk. She is especially gifted at describing the experiences of Chinese emigrants. How did Law, one of the last working woman directors from Hong Kong and Taiwan, attain Australian government film grants after emigrating there?

Weighing only about 40 kilos, Law looks light enough to blow away in a strong wind, so it's hard to imagine her barking out orders on a film set.

But when Law and her husband Eddie Fong were invited to attend the Taipei Film Festival last year, Fong, who is also a screenwriter and director, revealed, "Clara is very strong willed, and everyone in the Australian film community knows that she can't be pushed around and rarely compromises." In The Goddess of 1967 there is a scene where the girl who is the film's leading character (played by Rose Byrne) and her mother encounter heavy winds in their car. The film crew had set up the lights to shoot this scene of a dust storm, when suddenly Byrne said she was hungry and wanted to rest. "Clara knew that she wasn't really hungry, but rather that she just found it difficult to concentrate sometimes since it was the first time she had been in a film, so she told Rose that she couldn't eat. The assistant director, who was Australian, looked aghast, as if Clara was a witch who was abusing a poor child."

The Goddess of 1967 refers to a '67 Chevy named "Goddess." In it a Japanese man goes to Australia to find the car of his dreams and happens to meet a blind girl named B.G. (Byrne). The two take to the road, hoping to find some direction to their lives. For her performance, Byrne won the best actress award at last year's Venice Film Festival. This was the second film Law and Fong had made with Australian government money since they immigrated there in 1994. (Floating Life was the first.)

Finding direction

Law explains that their decision to move to Australia was a well-laid plan, not a spur-of-the-moment thing. In 1993-1994, after shooting Fruit Punch and Temptation of a Monk in Hong Kong, the couple went to Australia to visit relatives and rest. It was then that they discovered that the technical level of the Australian film industry was very high.

"The biggest problem with making films in Hong Kong is the lack of money budgeted for post-production," Law notes. "Dolby sound costs a lot of money." They were extremely disappointed with the sound on Autumn Moon, so they decided to go to Australia to redo it. When the film was subsequently presented at the Sydney film festival, it was well received, and this brought them into contact with Australian producers. "Originally, we thought that we were just changing workplaces and would spend half the year in Australia writing and then half the year in Hong Kong shooting," Law says. "We didn't expect that it would be our destiny to put down roots in Australia."

Faced with Hollywood's cultural onslaught, governments around the world are offering grants to protect their own film industries. Last year the Australian government budgeted more than A$40 million (the equivalent of NT$700 million) for this purpose. As long as a film has an outstanding plan and the backing of a production company and a distributor, it has a chance at getting a grant. The amount of the grants vary, depending on the topic of a film.

For The Goddess of 1967, the Australian government provided nearly NT$50 million, or 70% of the total budget, Fong explains. Furthermore, they allowed the director to exercise creative control. The only problem was that they imposed strict deadlines and a quota of jobs that had to be filled by Australians, and they stipulated that Australian actors must be given first priority.

So as to seek creative inspiration and find new material in a foreign land, the two bought a four-wheel-drive SUV and explored all over Australia. The desert both frightened and intrigued Law: "I gradually began to feel that this ancient landscape was well suited to showing the loneliness of modern people," she recalls. "It was a good match for my films."

Culture clash

Law, who has now finished nine films, was born in Macao in 1957. In 1978 she graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a degree in English literature and found work in television. She directed 12 different TV movies before going to London to get her masters in 1982, where she majored in screenplay writing and directing. Her thesis project, They Say the Moon Is Fuller, won a silver medal at the Chicago Film Festival.

Her first film after graduating was the 1988 work The Other Half and the Other Half, which explored the uncomfortable problem of spouses being separated by national boundaries, a familiar situation in Hong Kong, which is a cradle of emigration. It was the first Hong Kong film to deal with this theme.

"I grew up amid two cultures," Law recalls. "When I was little, my grandfather taught me to read Chinese poems and do calligraphy. Then, when I entered English school, I learned how to think in English. It wasn't until I went abroad for three years that I discovered I was in fact neither Chinese nor English." Law says that from a young age all Hong Kongers learned that they were living in a borrowed place on borrowed time. Her childhood friends would all go abroad to study. Yet Hong Kong movies weren't acknowledging this problem. Since movies were regarded merely as entertainment, studio bosses weren't willing to invest in films on these sort of topics, for they didn't think that audiences would come to see them.

Law's second film, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus, was a modern adaptation of a classical Chinese novel about the unusual woman Pan Jin-lian. It was a more polished work than her first film. "Although the story is intentionally macabre," noted the Hong Kong critic Shek Kei, "the film displays Law's own style and succeeds with both its twists of plot and its portrayal of desire and killing for love. Law also does a good job of giving Joey Wang, who plays the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese courtesan, a darkly beautiful aura. The film is visually interesting and entertaining. Law has created a new model for shooting mythic-type Chinese films."

Law's third film, Farewell China, was nominated for nine Golden Horses in 1990, and was the chief competitor of Red Dust, which won that year's Golden Horse for best picture. Red Dust ended up winning eight Golden Horses, and Farewell China took only three, including a best leading actor award for Tony Leung. Nevertheless, the film received excellent notices from critics. Although Law may have lost out in the competition for awards, the film still earned her renown. Some, however, criticized the story for being excessively grim.

The film describes a Chinese couple who are anxious to get out of the mainland. The wife, played by Maggie Cheung, first receives permission to leave for America. After she gets there, her family loses all trace of her. Her husband, played by Leung, smuggles himself into America to try to find her. He can't speak English, and is penniless and destitute after his money is stolen by some homeless people. After he accidentally kills a Chinese gangster, he meets up with a young ethnic Chinese girl and acts as her pimp, losing all dignity. Meanwhile, his wife meets an even worse fate. She lives in a decrepit basement, where she is raped. In order to get a green card, she marries an old Chinese man who is a citizen, and eventually goes insane.

The various tragedies depicted in the film are rather hard to take. One critic wrote, "The director lays on the tragedy a little too thick. When the couple by chance meet up, one might expect a happy ending. But instead we get a crazy woman murdering her husband in front of the Statue of Liberty. It's a bit over the top."

Nevertheless, some viewers could identify with the plot. In one scene Cheung's character bicycles home to her run-down apartment with a discarded mattress on her back. "When she was struggling to get out of China, she would never have expected that she would end up like this in America," wrote one woman on the Internet. "When I saw this film as a 20-year-old, I thought it was rather sensational. But when I was 25 and went to America, I discovered that it was quite true to life."

A new tune in a foreign land

Two years later, Law applied to have her film Autumn Moon compete for a Golden Horse. Much to her surprise, the awards committee refused her application because the film lacked a distributor in Taiwan. Although not allowed to compete for a Golden Horse, it won the Gold Leopard Award at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and with this award Law began to receive notice in the international film community.

Autumn Moon, which was shot with Japanese money, depicts a Japanese man who goes to Hong Kong as a tourist when he is bored with his life. He uses a video camera to make a record of his daily life there, and meets Hui, a 15-year-old girl who is about to emigrate. Although communication is difficult, they quickly become friends. The girl's parents have already emigrated to Canada, leaving her behind with her grandmother. This "Japanese older brother" becomes her close friend, and she often takes him home to eat meals cooked by her grandmother. The three of them talk past each other, but they are very much like a family, and these scenes are quite amusing.

The program of the Taipei Film Festival describes this successful example of a Chinese-language film shot with foreign money thus: "Law masterfully portrays the wave of emigration that preceded the 1997 handover, as well as the withering of traditional culture and the loneliness and alienation experienced by modern people."

A year later, Law shot Temptation of a Monk, which takes as its departure point the military plots surrounding the Xuanwu Gate Incident during the Tang dynasty. Based on a novel by Hong Kong's Lillian Lee, the film was entirely shot in the mainland and explores themes of sexual desire and Zen Buddhism. The locations and scenery are stunningly beautiful, and the photography and art direction top-notch. Joan Chen, who plays two characters and actually shaved her head for the film, seduced audiences with her performances, appearing naked in several scenes. "Nevertheless, her characters are the biggest disappointments in the whole film," wrote the Hong Kong critic Shek Kei. "She isn't made up to look attractive, with the result that she isn't adequately alluring. Her princess character is not well developed, and then she suddenly becomes a widow and then a spy and assassin. It's all rather confusing."

After making Autumn Moon and Temptation of a Monk, two highly stylized works, Law went back to the theme of emigration at which she excels, getting a grant from the Australian government to film Floating Life. The result, both in terms of its visual and narrative techniques, was much more accessible. Unlike Farewell China, which depicts a tragedy in a foreign land, Floating Life explores the problem of the generation gap between the first and second generation of Chinese emigrants and the clash between Chinese and Western culture.

The story is set on the eve of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to the PRC. It shows what a Hong Kong family with five children encounter when they immigrate to Australia.

Farewell Hong Kong

Floating Life was the first film that Clara Law made after moving to Australia. "Many people just discuss Floating Life from the perspective of immigration," Law says, "but what I really intended to show was how fleeting life is, and how people go about surviving in rootless societies." We should try to adopt longer-term perspectives, she says, because in the end we're all going to meet our maker.

The vast, virgin expanses of the Australian continent have sparked a new creative fire in Law. The Goddess of 1967 adopts such techniques used in television commercials as exaggerated contrasts of brightness, grainy film, and oversaturation of color. "The wonderfully weird visual style differs greatly from her old works," notes the program of the Taipei Film Festival. "It's the new Australian Law, not the old Hong Kong Law."

The Australian government was quite pleased with the film made by this scriptwriting and directing couple and has chosen Floating Life to be one of eight official Australian entrants at international film festivals.

Law seems to have found new creative energy in Australia, where both her works have been about how people try to find themselves in the modern world. "Although we don't know where we're going, it is our journey. We hope that audiences will take to the road with us."

p.90

Elegant Clara Law came to Taiwan for the Taipei Film Festival, where film buffs had the opportunity to see her new work, The Goddess of 1967. (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)

p.93

Floating Life, which was shot on an Australian government grant, describes what happens to a Hong Kong family with five children when they move to Australia before Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule. (courtesy of the Taipei Film Festival)

p.94

Law first discovered the surreally magnificent Australian countryside featured in The Goddess of 1967 when she took her own road trip around the continent with her husband Eddie Fong.