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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