The Lady: Michelle Yeoh and Luc Besson Get Nonviolent
Here's a trailer for The Lady, French director Luc Besson's new biopic of Burmese opposition leader and Nobel Prize-winner Aung Saan Suu Kyi. And if you're going to make a movie about one of the world's most famous nonviolent activists, why not cast one of the world's most famous martial arts movie stars?
Michelle Yeoh, star of a bunch of great Hong Kong action movies in the early 90s—but maybe best-known in the U.S. for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon—stars as Suu Kyi, who's spend the majority of the last two decades under house arrest thanks to the ruling military junta (she's currently free, though who knows for how long). And if you heard that Michelle Yeoh was making a movie with Luc Besson (you know—Léon, Nikita, The Fifth Element) you probably wouldn't think... Oscar-bait drama about a pacifist politician?
But, we have to say, this doesn't look bad at all, as stirring biopics go. (And, as it happens, there's plenty of action, though not much involving Yeoh, it looks like). Remus Lupin stars as Suu Kyi's late husband Michael Aris.