Ang Lee is a consummate professional; his films are handsomely mounted, well acted, crisply photographed and a little cold to the touch. With his longtime filmmaking partner James Schamus – who has, at the time of writing, been a producer of every one of Lee’s films and screenwriter of all but two – Lee evinces a particular interest in cultural and generational conflicts as they play out within and between individuals. This preoccupation began with his first feature, Pushing Hands (1992), in which an ageing Chinese tai chi master relocates to upstate New York to live with his son’s family. (Lee himself was born and raised in Taiwan and moved abroad after college to study film at New York University.)

A pair of gay lovers stages a heterosexual marriage ceremony for the benefit of one partner’s traditional Taiwanese parents in Lee’s second film, The Wedding Banquet (1993), which continued the culture-clash theme while introducing another Lee motif: the all-too-frequent incompatibility between emotional instinct and social convention. Lee has also taken a recurrent interest – first seen in the mouthwatering Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) – in young women who struggle to identify and assert their own will in a patriarchal society, from the dispossessed Dashwood sisters in Sense And Sensibility (1995) to Zhang Ziyi’s spoilt-princess-turned-bandit-queen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). (Lee has half-jokingly called Crouching Tiger “Sense And Sensibility with martial arts”.)

While it’s easy to admire Lee’s elegant work, until recent years it’s often been difficult to love or embrace it (especially his flatfooted attempt at an American Civil War epic, 1999’s Ride With The Devil). His cool, distant, even decorous approach sometimes keeps his characters at arm’s length and his dramatic action securely under glass. This is partly due to his muted, unerringly tasteful style, but is perhaps inevitable given his calm, even serene, fascination with repression, be it self-willed or socially enforced. Repression torments the abused-child-turned-explosive-CGI-freak in Hulk (2003), the secretive hedonists of 1970s American suburbia in The Ice Storm (1997) and the clandestine cowboy sweethearts of Brokeback Mountain (2005).

In Crouching Tiger, mere lingering gazes between the wistful would-be lovers (played by Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh) insinuate the everlasting passion of soul mates. A loving homage to the kinetic delirium of the Chinese martial-arts epic in its Shaw Brothers heyday, Crouching Tiger won a rapturous response from audiences and critics alike, becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in Hollywood history. It was the first Ang Lee film to aspire beyond intelligent social satire and rueful reconciliation towards something like ecstasy, while Brokeback Mountain (for which Lee won his second best-director Oscar) is perhaps his warmest, most emotionally involving film to date – a weepie that comes by those tears honestly.

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