The recent visit to the U.S. by Aung Sun Suu Kyi is an auspicious time for The Lady, a film dramatizing her struggle against the brutal military rulers of her homeland, Burma (Myanmar). Aung earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her campaign against the regime, and casting the global spotlight on her murderous government has gradually brought results. The Lady is out on Blu-ray and DVD.
Although prefaced with the always-alarming caption “Based on a True Story,” many small details and most of the larger themes conform to facts. Aung, the daughter of the martyred father of Burma’s independence, could have enjoyed a quiet life at Oxford University as the wife of a British academic and mother of their two children. But when called home to attend her sick mother, Aung found herself moved by protesters waving portraits of her father and shaken by the naked violence of the regime’s response. Called upon by Burma’s intelligentsia, she somewhat reluctantly assumed leadership over a pro-democracy party that easily won Burma’s first free election in decades, only to be held under house arrest as the military discounted the vote.
French director Luc Bresson (The Fifth Element) could be accused of clipping the complexity to fit into a classic three-act drama, but that’s what storytellers have done since the first bards recited around the campfire and the formula hasn’t lost its power to captivate. Bresson moves the story along efficiently with telling visual details, establishing Aung’s political ethics with a glimpse of her reading a book on Gandhi and her humanity when she sleeps on the hospital floor next to her mother’s bed, unafraid of the scurrying cockroaches. Her Zen calm in the face of death suggests hagiography but then, maybe saints really have lived in the modern world.
The Lady stars Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as Aung and David Thewlis (from the Harry Potter cycle) as her husband, Michael Aris.
