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.