The Joy Luck Club

We've been hearing a lot of nostalgia regarding 1993 in film. This year's "12 Years A Slave" is the new "Schindler's List." A.A. Dowd wrote a brilliant article on the visual effects of "Jurassic Park" and the terrible attempts of later films to recreate the visual magic. Perhaps the likely candidacy of Hillary Clinton has reminded some of the documentary "The War Room" about her husband's successful campaign for president, and maybe "Blackfish" reminded you of "Free Willy." We're in between Halloween and Christmas, so of course there's Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas." I haven't even mentioned "Groundhog Day," "The Piano," "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," "Tombstone,"  "Mrs. Doubtfire" or "The Fugitive."    

Like the other films, "The Joy Luck Club" is twenty years old this year, and it's as good as or better than some of the ones I mentioned. It's certainly as thought-provoking. I kept thinking about the Hofstede Center's analysis of China's culture. According to the Hofstede Center, China is a society that can be described as masculine--success-oriented and driven--along with acting in the "interests of the group and not necessarily of themselves." Additionally, China is "a society that believes that inequalities amongst people are acceptable." "People should not have aspirations beyond their rank."  Perhaps some of this has changed or is changing, but in 1993 I would guess not so much.  Is the American way so much better? Not necessarily, and you will notice that the U.S. and China share similar numbers in terms of masculinity/femininity, while being so much lower in long-term orientation, implying that American businesses and governments are not pragmatic in their long-term business goals. How shocking. Why is any of this important? Because the characters in Wayne Wang's film deal with these aspects of their cultures. The girls learn to shout in a quiet, traditionalist culture, and it's awesome.

But it's not the provocation of thought that makes "The Joy Luck Club" a great film, but its characters, screenplay, direction, score and other elements that do. At the start of the film, we are introduced to four mothers who meet often for a game of mahjong. After one of their members has passed away, the remaining three invite June, the daughter of the deceased, to play. "So I sat down on the east, where things begin," she tells us, "with my mother's best friends." This is the Joy Luck Club, and its three elderly members are referred to by the younger one as her aunties.  "Their connection with each other had more to do with hope," we are told, "than joy or luck."  The game is sort of a merging of memory; it's here where we begin to see the perspectives of eight women--four young American women and their mothers, immigrants from China.

This is a story of women and their mothers, and so it is as universal a story as possible. Not many things, for example, are as culturally universal as bragging mothers and their competitions for the most talented offspring. Case in point is the first story we are told. Young June (Melanie Chang) is a pianist in training, but she hits a few wrong notes and embarrasses her mother at a recital. A child's worst nightmare--hitting the wrong notes in front of an audience--is only slightly more humiliating than letting her parents down. An argument between the two provokes young June to shout that she wishes she were dead--"like them, the babies you killed in China." From here, we discover along with adult June that her aunties have found those two babies, once thought to be dead but now living in China.  The party which opens our film and we occasionally return to is a going-away party for June, and each of the seven characters gets a turn to tell her own story.

The stories are as equally fascinating as they are diverse. They range from tales of traditional marriage in China to complicated love in America, obedience versus empowerment, and high expectations from Tiger Moms against daughters who yearn for affection. The stories are surprisingly humorous. In one, a young Chinese girl explains to her husband (whom she has never met or even seen) on their wedding day that she prayed so that her husband would not be too old. Upon discovering that he has barely begun puberty, she exclaims that she must have prayed too hard. In another, one of the young ladies is asked by her white partner about her mother's hypothetical reaction to their marriage. Her response: "She'd rather get rectal cancer." The accounts are also rather adult--you might be surprised to see such sexual imagery in watermelon. But they can also be raw at times, with scenes of rape and slight allusions to China's one child policy. They all feature numerous characters, and hardly any is uninteresting.

"The Joy Luck Club" is not exactly the best acted movie in the world. Case in point, Ming-na Wen as June. Wen has an exceptional voice (you may recognize her as the voice of Mulan in the Disney film). But even with the rich material she is given, she doesn't deliver as hoped.  Neither do her three colleagues. The four mothers (Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen and Lisa Lu), however, are a joy, as are the child actors. And its screenplay, by Ronald Bass and Amy Tan (the author of the novel), is wonderfully written. I loved its lines, so simple yet so exciting, like one of the mothers telling us that "on that day, I learned to shout"; this is one of the very few movies to really get narration right. It's corny at times, especially towards the end, and its "I see you" moment is only slightly odder than when that line was uttered in "Avatar." Still, this really is a remarkable movie that will likely leave you thinking about for a long time, and surely deserves a spot on any top ten list of 1993.