Ang Lee

A Taiwanese man in New York stages a wedding to a Chinese woman so his parents will stop asking about the boyfriend he lives with, in The Wedding Banquet. Two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming keep a relationship going through both their marriages in Brokeback Mountain, and a widowed Taipei chef and his three grown daughters rearrange an entire household around what gets said at meals in Eat Drink Man Woman. Lee changes country, language and genre constantly, taking on wuxia in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a comic-book monster in Hulk, and the withheld feeling survives every one of those moves. You watch people manage their faces, and wait to learn the price.

Signature

• Repression made physical in meals, manners, uniforms and choreography.
• The family as the room where culture and desire collide.
• Genre worn over a small melodrama: wuxia, comic book, war epic.
• Feeling earned by how long it was withheld.

Distinguish from Shares Forbidden Love with sentimental melodrama directors, but sits at prestige or arthouse — the feeling is withheld rather than pushed. Brokeback Mountain is the clearest case: identical theme to a Hallmark weepie, opposite register.