Pushing Hands

An early gem from Sense and Sensibility director Ang Lee, Pushing Hands refers to the Oriental t'ai chi exercise where you keep your balance while unbalancing your opponent. This is an apt metaphor for the narrative about a retired martial arts expert Lung Sihung, whose life is turned upside down when he moves in with his son and his American wife in a New York suburb. As in Lee's later film The Wedding Banquet the cultural and generational gap between the elderly parent and the Americanised son is all too clear. While not as assured as his later works, Lee's observations and subtlety are very much worth watching as the older man struggles to fit in with his hostile daughter-in-law (Deb Snyder).