MOVIE REVIEW : Delicate Cultural Flavor in ‘Bowl of Tea’

Wayne Wang gets shadows and a honey-soft glow into the images of his fine new film “Eat a Bowl of Tea” (Music Hall). Pinned down in darkness, the flesh tones gleam like peach-skin pearls. Like his last movie, the vacuous but gaudily shot thriller “Slamdance,” “Tea” resembles a sort of film noir under glass. But it’s a delicate, rummy little film noir that doesn’t heave murder and cliches at us. The melodramatic plot points are buried within a naturalistic, nostalgic story, set in an era and place--the late ‘40s in New York’s Chinatown--that begins to seem stylized as a Czech puppet film.

Based on Louis Chu’s 1961 novel, “Tea” is about a young Chinatown couple pressured so outrageously to produce children that, finally, they can’t even make love. This is no smutty joke. The Exclusion Laws, in effect for 60 years until they were repealed in the mid-’40s, had banned women and new immigrants from entering the country. Chinatown, in the late ‘40s, was a community of aging virtual bachelors.

So, swarming around the movie’s young couple--Army vet Wang Ben Loy (Russell Wong) and his immigrant bride Mei Oi (Cora Miao, the wife of director Wang)--are an enclave of grinning old voyeurs who can barely contain their lascivious curiosity. Deprived of marital sex and family, they turn the wedding pair into both heroes and butts. Worst of all is Ben Loy’s father, Wang Wah Gay (Victor Wong), who’s seen his prestige rise as a result of the marriage and fears it will topple if they can’t produce. The joker in this randy deck is a wily, chubby Lothario named Ah Song, played with beaming panache by Hong Kong comedy star Eric Tsang Chi Wai.

The couple, in turn, are drowned in romantic fantasy: the plush, moonstruck images they’ve flushed out of movies and pop songs. Wang stages the action against creamy ‘40s pop ballads--a Chinese chanteuse, languorously crooning “Slow Boat to China”--scat songs and standards. And he surrounds his lovers with great lustrous images out of movies. When Ben Loy woos Mei Oi in her village, they’re before a huge screen showing Capra’s “Lost Horizon.” Later on, the couple get hot with Orson and Rita in Welles’ “Lady From Shanghai,” and, still later, the romanticism has shriveled to pint-size: a scene from Cukor’s “Holiday” on a tiny TV, which they all but ignore.

Wang’s major subject is the fusion of Chinese and American cultures. In “Eat a Bowl of Tea”--a vernacular phrase that roughly means “Take your medicine”--he’s again examining it with irony and affection. One of his funniest insights is in the way he replaces cliched images of smiling, remote, somewhat sinister Sino-Americans with earthy and pragmatic urban wise guys, more realistic cousins of the slangy, extroverted hipsters Keye Luke played in the ‘40s. Indeed, one flaw in the film may be that Mei Oi is too Americanized, acclimated too rapidly. This Chinese girl, fresh from the countryside, in the end, cops attitudes that seem more compatible with post-’70s liberation.

The youngsters are good but sometimes facile. The oldsters around them shine. As Wah Gay, Wong gives another eccentric and endearing comic performance. He is a great oddball camera subject: His face looks like a withered fruit split down the middle and pasted back together slightly askew, with a crooked, slithery grin and the eyes popping frenziedly in either direction. His character here isn’t like the warmhearted “uncle” he played in Wang’s “Dim Sum.” This is a warm-hearted, patriarchal nut-case and Wong acts him with the unabashed comic fervor of Charley Grapewin’s Grampaw Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Judith Rascoe’s screenplay is so briskly compressed, the movie feels almost distilled. Shot in Hong Kong, in sets that are like a dollhouse vision, the characters are seen flailing around in their little rituals of love, cultural adjustment, betrayal, shame and violence, just as trapped in the plot as they are in conventions and culture. But there’s nothing stifling or ragged about the imagery in “Eat a Bowl of Tea” (MPAA-rated PG-13, despite sexual content). It’s like a photo album with the pages being precisely turned, one after the other. That’s the key to the movie: a mixture of love and sarcasm. Like those medicinal herb teas, it’s steeped in bitterness and warmth, soaked in tradition and life.