Joan of Art

It might sound like the ultimate East-goes-West success story. Chen Chong, the daughter of two Shanghai doctors, becomes a movie star at 15, is dubbed “the young Elizabeth Taylor of China” and, at 19, wins the country’s top acting prize. She goes to America where, as Joan Chen, she stars in The Last Emperor, Twin Peaks and Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth. Chen shuttles between East and West, playing fiercely intelligent seducers in the Hong Kong Temptation of a Monk and Red Rose, White Rose while making onscreen love with Anne Heche in Hollywood’s Wild Side. She marries happily to Peter Hui, a San Francisco cardiologist. Who could ask for anything more?

Joan Chen always asked, demanded, more of herself–certainly more than Hollywood wanted of her. “The only thing I achieved going to the States was that I became an exotic beauty,” she says. “I did my best to give a version of Chinese-ness that the West was looking for. But I also understood that that version of me was worthless. I wanted to do something more serious.” Clearly, Chen’s striking beauty–searchlight eyes, long, strong neck and, it must be said, the most luscious mouth on either side of the Pacific–is merely the wrapping for surpassing talent and drive. Hollywood’s favorite China doll wanted to direct.

So she went back to the remote reaches of her homeland–to the edge of Sichuan, near the Tibetan steppes–to make Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl. The film, based on Tian Yu, a 1995 novel by Chen’s childhood friend Yan Geling, is about a naive urban teenager who, like more than 7 million other “educated youth” during the Cultural Revolution, is “sent down” to the countryside to be instructed by the heroic peasantry; instead she learns harsh lessons about the brutality of men in power. The authorities refused to give a permit to the project, so Chen shot without a permit.

When Xiu Xiu premiered at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, China’s verdict was swift. “I was banned from working in China for one year,” Chen says, “and told to pay a fine of 10% of the budget.” The film cost $1 million, much of it out of Chen’s pocket. And though it won seven Golden Horse awards (the Chinese-language Oscars), including best film, actor, actress, script and director, it will not be shown soon in China. Perhaps an apology from Chen would help. “I do recognize that I filmed illegally in China,” she says, “and I formally promise, in TIME magazine, that I’ll never do it again. That’s my apology.”

Chen, 38, need apologize to no one else. Her film, which plays April 11 at the Palm Beach Film Festival and the following week at the Boston Women’s Film Festival before opening around the country May 7, is a delicate, harrowing epic in miniature; it has an artist’s attention to the harsh allure of physical and psychological landscapes. Xiu Xiu would be memorable if only for its stars: Lu Lu, now 17, an elfin charmer whom Chen found studying English in San Francisco, and the Tibetan actor Lopsang as a herdsman who befriends Xiu Xiu. But the movie is more than a star-is-born showcase. This story of a girl who rolls down the slope of degradation, and finally has no power but to choose her own grim fate, is a worthy cinematic sister to Mouchette, Robert Bresson’s great document of adolescent despair.

The film is also exciting as emotional autobiography–a declaration of independence from an artist who felt trapped straddling East and West. “Working with her,” says Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast Chen as the spoiled royal wife in the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, “I had the feeling she was somehow in exile, not always comfortable. So I love the idea that my own Empress in exile went back to China as a film director.”

Xiu Xiu begins her adventure as if it will be the coolest summer camp. Her tailor father sews blouses for his girl; her mother provides sensible advice. The family’s easy warmth seems endearingly ordinary here. By the end of the film it will be a miraculous memory, an image that Xiu Xiu can barely touch without getting burned.

She is sent to train in horsemanship with Lao Jin, a veteran herder. Lao Jin is tough and tender, instantly devoted to the girl’s well-being. Xiu Xiu, the sent-down girl, is still stuck-up; but she cannot ignore Lao Jin’s kindness. When she complains about not being able to wash, he builds her a small pool. “Your eyes will rot if you peek!” she tells him as she bathes. Yet the little flirt wants him to look. She needs to know she fascinates men.

Each day Xiu Xiu dresses up for the ride back to civilization that never comes. Then a peddler appears. He tells Xiu Xiu that pretty girls like her are using their wiles with party officials to get sent back to the city. Why, he will put in a word to them. Dazzled by the glare of his promise in this long night of isolation, Xiu Xiu surrenders to him. And then to rougher strangers, all in the hope of getting a pass home. Without money or connections, she asks, “What’s a girl to do?” The cute girl is a broken woman now, a soldier’s trophy. All along, she has been coquettishly courting disaster–a prom date with death. Now that affair will be consummated.

Chen was Xiu Xiu’s age during the Cultural Revolution but did not get sent down. “She was one of those people who did everything well,” says her friend Yan. With grandparents educated at Oxford and parents educated at Harvard, Chen had the pedigree for success, as well as the stern expectations. Joan’s father kept asking what she was going to do with her life. “In my family,” Chen says, “going into acting was regarded as strange.”

Excelling at marksmanship, she was discovered on the school rifle range by no less a talent scout than Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, and went into movies, starring in all her roles. For Little Flower (1980), playing a revolutionary’s daughter in pre-Maoist China, she won the Hundred Flowers Award. Instead of staying in China, she moved to New York City as an actress-model. “I was clueless when I arrived,” she recalls. “The cultural shock–even the toothpaste tasted different! My desire to go to the States was so vague, yet so strong. It’s like going to heaven: you don’t plan what happens after you enter.” Chen quickly learned what Westerners expected of an Asian woman. On one of her first auditions, she says, “they told me I didn’t look Chinese enough, and I was the only Chinese there. I was trying so hard to look like a white woman.”

Chen studied filmmaking at California State University at Northridge and then–lightning strikes again–was seen crossing a parking lot by mogul Dino De Laurentiis. Instantly she had the lead Asian role in his 1985 TV saga Tai-Pan. For more than a decade, Chen was excellent in good movies and amusing in bad ones. In Stanley Kwan’s Red Rose, White Rose she is a figure of eros and pathos, driving her lover quietly nuts with her desperate vitality; the turn won her a Hong Kong Film Critics award. Back in the West, she copped a less prestigious prize–a Razzie nomination for worst actress–when she played an Inuit activist in Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground. In that and Judge Dredd, she was just fabulous-looking furniture.

Her verdict on those two cinematrocities: “The sad thing is, they weren’t the worst films I did.” Chen may be thinking of Wild Side, a fascinating mess in which she took a three-minute nude roll in the sheets with Heche, who later became Ellen DeGeneres’ lesbian partner. “Before me, she was with boys,” Chen says roguishly. “After me she came out. No, I’m kidding, I’m kidding!”

Chen wasn’t kidding about her unease over her career. Yan recalls that after a bad film experience Chen would “bang her head against the wall. We’d talk about her trying to go to medical school or do a law degree. But I always said, ‘Bullshit, you’ll forget it all tomorrow.’ And of course she always did.”

Yan rescued her friend with Tian Yu, a novel that stirred in Chen both a memory of the Cultural Revolution and a long-deferred desire to direct. Chen could have shot her film in the familiar cocoon of a movie studio. But to be faithful to Xiu Xiu’s story meant filming it near Tibet. “The location was 13,000 ft. high,” Chen says. “It was hard to breathe. We didn’t take showers for a month. We were all sniffing each other. Lunch on the set was always late and cold. Or it wouldn’t arrive. So we ate yak meat, yak meat, yak meat.”

As a first-time director, Chen says, “at times I felt like the captain of the Titanic.” Chen may also have felt like Xiu Xiu: both abandoned by the government hierarchy and subject to its whim. “Every day we worried that our equipment would be confiscated and that the film negative would never get out of China. But fortunately nobody came to look for us.” Unlike Xiu Xiu, of course, Chen chose these conditions on her own terms: she sent herself down. “Hardship is the romantic part of filmmaking,” she says. “You endure for a few months, then you go home.”

Besides, working on the rough edge of nature offers its vagrant epiphanies. “One day,” Chen recalls, “it started raining. We got on the bus, and everyone was so tired, they dozed off. Except for me; I’m an insomniac. I was listening to Rachmaninoff and staring out the window. The black clouds were rolling, but at the end of the horizon a strip of blue showed up, then a rainbow. It was very intense–strong and beautiful, like a gate to heaven. I woke everybody up, and we got it in the movie. So seldom do you see beauty face to face. It was all worth it for that one day.”

The Chinese censors and their 10% fine be damned. With her sad, lovely, expert film, Chen may not have a pot of gold, but she has a rainbow.

–Reported by Isabella Ng and Stephen Short/Hong Kong