Sense and Sensibility
VIEW EVENT DETAILSPart of "Water and Oil: The Movies of Ang Lee"

Asia Society presents Water and Oil: The Movies of Ang Lee; a complete retrospective from February 14-23 with select appearances by the filmmaker and collaborators.
Sense and Sensibility
Ang Lee, UK/USA, 1995, 35mm, 136 min.
Ang Lee followed up his Taiwanese American “Father Knows Best” trilogy with another intimate family drama about love, duty, and the gulf between desire and expectation: screenwriter/actor Emma Thompson’s Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility. Perhaps an unlikely match on the surface, Lee and Austen turned out to be excellent bedfellows, possessed as they both are of a keen sensitivity to the norms and codes governing life within a given social milieu, and an understanding of the costs (and benefits) of transgression.
Thompson and a young Kate Winslet play Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. One is responsible and reserved; the other rash and expressive. Both are in love, and neither knows what to do about it. Lee’s commitment to centering their feelings, no matter how repressed or reckless, gives the film an immediacy that transcends its rather handsome period trappings. Despite his documented frustration with the British school of acting— Hugh Grant recalls his assessment of an early take as “very boring”— the filmmaker manages to draw lively performances out of his impressive cast, which includes Alan Rickman, Hugh Laurie and Hugh Grant as the women's suitors. If not big on Lee at first either, they seem to have come around; or as Rickman put it in his diary dated May 4, 1994: “I’m beginning to get the hang of Ang.” Presented on 35mm.
A limited amount of complimentary tickets will be available to NYC college students with ID at the box office on the day of the screening.
—Janet Maslin, NY Times
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