Team FC
What better way to repress love than in the name of honour? In Lee’s wuxia film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) are trained warriors deeply in love with one another. But their affection is mired by the death of a dear friend: a man who died saving Mu Bai and was engaged to marry Shu Lien.
Lee’s gay love story is set in stiflingly traditional circumstances: two masculine cowboys find reluctant passion in 1963, Wyoming – the same place where gay American student Matthew Shepard’s body will be found 35 years later.
Much like the title suggests, Lee presents the idea of a tense sensuality in Lust, Caution – one that can only emerge between adversaries. A strikingly beautiful Wang Tei plays Wong Chia Chi, who must entice and enable the assassination of the dangerous Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), an agent of the puppet government set up by the Japanese occupation in China.
It’s easy to see how this adaptation of Jane Austen’s earliest work, set in the 1800s, had most of its passion seen as ‘forbidden’. Even so, Sense and Sensibility has some of the most evocative – and melodramatic – depictions of romance. Take for instance, the growing companionship between Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) and Elinor Dashwood (Emma Thomson).
Wedding Banquet is perhaps Lee’s earliest and most lighthearted stab at forbidden passion. It revolves around Wai Tung (Winston Chao), whose traditional Taiwanese parents would probably drop dead if they knew that he lives with his boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein) in New York City.