It is one of those sensational, semi-stupid questions that a journalist sometimes cannot summon his wit and restraint from asking: Would she, Michelle Yeoh, have made the same decision as the character she plays, Aung San Suu Kyi?
MAIN PHOTO: YINGYONG UN-ANONGRAK
"I don't know," replies Yeoh, her eyes probing from under her glasses. "I wasn't brought up like her, so that's a hard question." She pauses. "I could've told you 'Yes, I would!' But no. I really don't know.
"Because with that kind of commitment over so many years, it must be very, very tough," Yeoh continues. "Aung San said that during her first year of house arrest, she learned to meditate, and the idea of what she had to do became clearer in her mind.
"I think at the most difficult moment in life, you find yourself."
Yeoh's reply outwits the impossibility of the question. The decision that Aung San Suu Kyi made, as currently retold in The Lady, her biopic directed by French director Luc Besson, is too formidable, too historic to impose as generality: She decided to choose her country over her family - to heed the call of history and leave the warmth of normalcy behind, maybe forever.
In 1988 Suu Kyi, who had been living with her husband and two sons in Oxford, returned to Myanmar to visit her ailing mother. In Yangon, demonstrations broke out against the military junta and Suu Kyi, daughter of Aung San, a soldier who fought for Burmese independence from the British, was thrust into the frontline of the pro-democracy movement that lasts until this minute. The junta soon realised how dangerous this small woman with an air of calm authority was, and put her under house arrest. Suu Kyi didn't return to England since and hardly saw her family again. Not even when her husband, Michael Aris, was dying of cancer in 1997.
It was a different kind of commitment that has brought Yeoh, a Malaysian-born actress, to portray the Burmese Nobel laureate. Yeoh had heard of a script being written about the life of Suu Kyi, and she was so inspired by it that she put all her efforts and influences to make sure the project took off. It was she who approached Luc Besson to direct ("She cast me, I didn't cast her," Besson says). And since the first image of the film was released last year, Yeoh's striking resemblance to Suu Kyi - the narrow face, the serene conviction, the steadfast eyes, even the flowers in her hair - aroused much expectation from the first feature film of this iconic figure who's still active and whose struggle seems to have recently gained a sliver of hope.
Michelle Yeoh and Luc Besson on the set.
"It's a great compliment to think that I can look even half like Daw Suu," Yeoh says, using a respected nickname of Aung San Suu Kyi. "Physically she's one of the most beautiful women, and internally she is like that, too.
"Daw Suu is such a recognisable figure, so to try to look like her is the least thing we have to do in our profession. But when we sat down with the hair and the makeup people and went through the period of 10 years that we wanted to show her life, from the beginning we realised quickly that it wasn't just the angle, or the lighting or the way I looked. It's what she has in her eyes that tells us what's happening inside her, and that's the most challenging task."
The Lady, which is showing in Thai cinemas now and which has received mixed reviews internationally, opts to give an equal weight to Aung San Suu Kyi's political ordeal and her domestic dilemma. In the film, Yeoh gets to do a big rallying speech, in Burmese, in front of the Shwedagon (digitally matted in, since 80% of the film was shot in Thailand), and she also gets to do crunching scenes of longing and heartache with David Thewlis, who plays the British husband of Suu Kyi.
"For us, this isn't just a political story. It's also a love story," says Yeoh. "We always see Aung San as a strong, tough woman. There are two stories running in parallel. You see the contradictions between the East and the West, and you see someone who does mundane and normal things - someone who's supposed to be a housewife - and then someone who's become important and imprisoned. This is a story of a commitment of a family that has to sacrifice and go through a lot of pain."
"Our mission is to show how she became Aung San Suu Kyi," adds Besson. "What we know when we read articles about her is just a facade. But how would you go from a woman in Oxford with two kids straight to 30 years of fighting? What makes you that person?"
The Lady is one of the two recent biopics of strong women who walk unblinking into the eye of a political hurricane - the other is the somewhat differently titled The Iron Lady, in which Meryl Streep brays and blusters through the swamps of Westminster as Margaret Thatcher. The discussion has been prevalent about the kind of acting as impersonation, when high-powered actresses calibrate every tic and mannerism to match the actual figures they portray, or at least the public image of those figures. We can also add Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn to this roll call of contemporary performers in the shoes of historical women.
Yeoh has a different idea; she finds the term "impersonation" rather undignified, especially when it comes to a person she has such great love and respect for. It was impossible for her to meet Aung San Suu Kyi before filming - Daw Suu was under house arrest until November 2010, and Yeoh only went through Bangkok to see her in Yangon last year. So to prepare for the role, the actress dug into a long and laborious research. She read all the articles and she watched all the footage of Suu Kyi in the process of inhabiting the inner self of the personality most people know only from a newspaper. "I watched and watched and watched, and I tried to put inside myself who her hero was, how she's become who she is, the story of her father and mother, even what kind of books she read when she was young," says Yeoh.
"So I sat there and pieced together everything, because I knew it's up to me to bring her to the big screen. However, the big issue is her private life, and you get to the point where you realise that the only person who knows the exact truth about Daw Suu is Michael Aris [her late husband]. It's really hard, but then you have to trust your own instinct [going into the role]. I hope that when you're watching the movie, you don't see me and you see a three-dimensional Aung San Suu Kyi."
We'll see her, but it's not easy for the people in Myanmar to do the same. Despite the recent signs that the military government has relaxed its iron grip, and that Suu Kyi will run for a seat in parliament in a few months, it's unlikely that The Lady will find an official channel to be shown in Myanmar. The story of Aung San Suu Kyi - the real Suu Kyi - is far from over; in fact, it's only getting more interesting with the unexpected developments of the past year.
"We hope we could show the film in Myanmar, of course we'd love to do that," says Yeoh. "We're storytellers who wish to remind that this is what happens. We're not trying to demonise or make anybody ashamed. We're telling the story as it is. What happened is bad history, and let's hope that the future is going for the better. We wish them the very best, and we'd love to see Aung San Suu Kyi as the president one day."
