The Lady (2011)
Directed by Luc Besson

Film Review

On the face of it, Luc Besson would appear to be the least likely person to recount the real-life experiences of Burma's pro-democracy crusader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.  Besson's field of expertise is showy crowd-pleasers which have immediate visual impact but very little in the way of depth and dramatic realism.  He gave up any pretence to be a serious film auteur after Le Grand bleu (1988) - ironically his best film - was mauled to death by the critics; since, he has largely concerned himself with mainstream cinema, in the Hollywood-style blockbuster mould, be it in the role of producer or director.  What made Besson's decision to direct The Lady even more improbable was that this comes in the slipstream of his Minimoys films, impossibly cute fodder for toddlers that somehow proved to be major box office winners.  The press reaction to Besson's ambitious biopic was predictably hostile, although on this occasion much of the criticism is entirely justified.  Having watched the film it is painfully evident that Luc Besson (arguably French cinema's most commercially minded film director) was probably not the best person to give us a guided tour of the life of Aung San Suu Kyi.

And you don't have to wait that long until your worst fears about the film are confirmed.  Within the first fifteen minutes, Besson's aversion for understatement and his tendency for pumping dramatic excess into every frame is painfully evident; any hopes that we may have had that The Lady was going to offer some serious insights into the psychology and life experiences of an exceptional world figure is pretty well decimated by the film's midpoint (although, to be fair, the film does improve marginally thereafter).  Besson's attempts to play the auteur (through such clumsy devices as the narrative flashback, which merely weaken the storyline and give the spectator a headache) help to draw our attention away from the weaknesses in the screenwriting, but do little to assist the film's coherence.  Eric Serra's score is just as heavy-handed - this ladles on the sentimentality to such a degree that the film's more genuinely stirring moments (and there are quite a few of these towards the end of the film) are rendered slightly false and unconvincing.

The Lady is by no stretch of the imagination a serious biopic.  For all its lavish production values and cinematic grandeur, it does not even begin to scratch the surface of Aung San Suu Kyi's complex persona and account for her remarkable personal resolve and determination to see democracy take root in her country.  Rather, it is more in the line of an old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama, a powerfully moving tale of love and selfless commitment in which two ordinary people have their lives torn apart by extraordinary events.  If Besson and his screenwriter Rebecca Frayn had reined in their ambitions a little and focussed more on the human story that lies at the heart of the drama The Lady might have been something very special.  As it is, it is just too showy with its grand set-pieces, too simplistic in its depiction of both Burma's political crises and the protagonists' feelings to ring true - in spite of a compelling central performance from Michelle Yeoh and the evident sincerity which she and her director bring to the film. 

The Lady's one saving grace is that, being an unashamed piece of populist cinema rather than an obscure art house offering, it has helped to spread awareness of the plight of Aung San Suu Kyi and her troubled country, which can be no bad thing.  For those who like their film dramas to have some meat on them, the film is somewhat lacking, unable to get much beyond Manichean simplification, making its heroine out to be a latter-day saint whilst portraying her opponents as little more than pantomime villains.  How frustrating that the film is content merely to rely on tacky sentiment-milking instead of plunging us into a plausible semblance of the emotional abyss that Aung San Suu Kyi shared with her husband Michael Aris as they fought for what what they believed to be right.  The real story of Aung San Suu Kyi is one that has yet to be told.  Besson's film is a mere hors d'oeuvre for the feast that is yet to come.

Film Synopsis

It is a love story almost without precedent, involving a man, Michael Aris, and an exceptional woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, who sacrificed her own personal happiness for the good of her people.  In spite of the traumas these two people experienced - their separation, their ill-treatment by Burma's brutal political regime - nothing could lessen their love.  It is also the story of a woman who was to become one of the most enduring symbols of a nation's fight for democracy...