Ang Lee gets leading role at Olympics

Film director Ang Lee.

BEIJING - Ang Lee is a free-wheeling, United States-schooled film director from what China likes to call the renegade province of Taiwan.

His films are regularly banned by Beijing for their controversial content and his Oscar acceptance speech had to be censored on state TV. The movie maverick is hard to picture as China's first choice as an ambassador for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

And yet Lee has just been selected as an arts and culture consultant for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Olympics in China.

The announcement that China would host the two-week event was greeted with a massive outpouring of national pride.

The capital is being remodelled for the Games and no other single event has better crystallised China's bid to become a fully paid-up respectable member of the global community than this high-profile athletics competition.

So why did China choose this 51-year-old Oscar winner to advise a creative team headed by fellow director Zhang Yimou that also included Hollywood's Steven Spielberg?

Lee's appointment is a calculated risk. It shows how seriously the Chinese Government and the Beijing organising committee are taking their efforts to make sure the Olympics are the biggest, brightest and most spectacular event in the history of the Games.

Like many people around the world, they have seen the sweeping martial-arts scenes that made Lee's 2000 box-office smash Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so successful. Or the breathtaking scenes of imperial might that made Yimou's Hero the best-selling Chinese movie.

Chinese cinema is seriously hip and China wants that cool to rub off on the Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies, on August 8 and 24.

While we cannot expect to see Bjork in an enormous, fabulous flowing dress as we did at Athens in 2004, the choice of Lee, Yimou and Spielberg shows China is gearing up for something spectacular.

Yimou's last two big-budget movies, Hero in 2002 and House of Flying Daggers in 2004, showcased a film industry that has the stars, the sets and the budgets to compete with the best of Hollywood.

Lee's Crouching Tiger started the ball rolling, revealing the talents of the actress Zhang Ziyi and giving an international audience a taste of Hong Kong legends such as Chow Yun-Fat.

But the selection of Lee also highlights a contradiction between the way China would like to be perceived by the world and the way its internal complicated politics work.

China considers Taiwan as sovereign territory, a renegade province that will one day be returned to the fold, by force if necessary.

Beijing censors any reference to the self-ruled island which suggests it is not part of "one China".

Lee was born in southern Taiwan and is viewed on the mainland as a native son. He built up his profile in Asia with his early movies, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink, Man Woman in 1993 and 1994 respectively, then embarked on films in the West, including Sense and Sensibility in 1995 and The Ice Storm in 1997, which transformed him into a big international player.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made him a huge name in China and national pride was again stirred when he picked up the best director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain this year. But homosexuality is still not widely tolerated in China and was considered a mental illness until five years ago. There was no way a gay cowboy romance was likely to get a release on the Chinese mainland, although it sold well on pirate DVD.

Chinese state media also cut the part of his acceptance speech where he thanked, in Chinese, "everyone" in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong.

But the Chinese organisers seem prepared to set aside any misgivings over Lee's previous form in the interest of staging a great show in 2008.

Although the Chinese film industry is growing in international importance, it has proved increasingly difficult for Chinese censors to keep a handle on it.

Most underground films featuring political content in China are never given a theatrical release and their directors are routinely banned. The exciting director Lou Ye was banned for five years in May after failing to submit his Cannes Film Festival entry, Summer Palace, for censorship.

The organising committee for the 2008 Olympics is making sure the details stay under wraps, and commentators in the Chinese media are curious about how the panel of artistic directors will present China's 5000-year-old culture during the ceremony, which is to last four hours.

If Yimou's previous stagings of operatic battle scenes and elaborate ancient rituals are anything to go by, the ceremony will be on a monster scale. Observers can also expect to see a lot of red, China's national colour. And the production notes of Yimou's version of The First Emperor, starring Placido Domingo onstage in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in December, may also give clues.

Yimou says there is more to Chinese culture than lanterns and opera, and he will show the world this at the opening ceremony.

"There are just so many well-known Chinese elements, such as lanterns, kites and Peking operas," he said. "There are also many aspects of Chinese culture few people know. For instance, I saw many different kinds of performances when I went to Yunnan to collect folk arts. They are new to people outside."

There may also be clues in a recent series of shows Yimou directed in Yunnan province in southwest China, where some commentators say the director has been practising for the Olympics.

Staged at the foot of Yulongxue (Jade Dragon Snow) Mountain, the shows feature hundreds of locals from 10 ethnic groups performing songs, dances and other folk rituals.

The smart money says kung-fu is likely to feature in the show; both Yimou and Lee have shown themselves to be big fans of gymnastic martial arts displays. Whatever they choose, getting it right is crucial: the Chinese people demand it.

The organising chief, Liu Qi, said: "The 1.3 billion Chinese people are full of aspirations for the Olympic Games, and they have very high expectations for the opening ceremony."

- INDEPENDENT