Here's what Ang Lee said:
Many things in "The Wedding Banquet" came out of my system. I thought it would be fine if the days were over, but they actually accumulated in my heart. In hindsight, maybe it was because I didn’t study well, I liked drama, and it was my father’s least favorite business, so I couldn’t do it, and I always had a sense of guilt in my subconscious. Feelings of helplessness, grievance, and apology are always stuffed in the depths of my heart, and there is a lot of backlog, so I made this kind of film.
The reason why I am used to dealing with Central Plains culture rather than Taiwanese culture is because it is a feeling, and it is related to my upbringing. I miss the ethics of the past because the old order provided us with a sense of security, and because the upbringing of the past formed part of my personality. When I am frustrated and tested, it naturally comes out. I have to face it, deal with it, always face it, whether it's satirical comedy or tragic sentimentality.
For us, the question of where to go for identity has been a tangle and confusion for nearly a hundred years. As the second generation from other provinces, I can't help but notice the issue of inheritance (Taiwanese films pay more attention to the awakening of national consciousness), not only the inheritance of culture, but also the inheritance of living habits and ethics. Facing the era of rapid changes, these inheritances have lost their taste, just like the dishes in "Diet Men and Women", they only have the appearance, and there is something missing from the inside.
I grew up in a very conservative family of scholar-officials, and my personality was not very rebellious, so the thing that most affected my heart was "ethics". Facing the inability to perform filial piety and the various contradictions between tradition and reality, I have something to say. Of course, many of them are lies given to us by the previous generation (each generation has its white lies), creating our illusions, a misguided identification, and these are all different from the truth.
I really don't know if "The Wedding Banquet" is doing a happy ending, but when someone told me about it, I started to think about it. In fact, this is related to my personality. Its ending is not "happy", but a desire for completeness and completeness, which has the meaning of complacency. If you want to "seek perfection", you must suffer some "grievances", which is also part of my personality.
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