Lucy Liu received Locarno Film Festival’s career achievement award Thursday, and presented her new film “Rosemead,” which had its international premiere at the festival. Liu talked with Variety about the film, which she stars in and produces.
In Eric Lin’s film, Liu plays Irene Chao, a Chinese-American single parent who is battling health issues, while caring for a son who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The film is based on a true story, and is inspired by an L.A. Times article by Frank Shyong.
More from Variety
“The heartbreak is not only what happened but how it happened: knowing that there were other options, but that Irene felt there weren’t any,” Liu says.
The film deals with a range of ideas within the Chinese-American community regarding mental health, from the son’s Chinese therapist to Irene’s friend who believes he should be treated with herbs and chanting to others in the community who just see his schizophrenia as shameful.
Liu is prepared for some in her own community to not accept the film. “If my mother saw this movie, she wouldn’t believe it,” she says. “She would be like: This is the worst piece of fiction.”
Part of the difficulty was the silence surrounding the family itself. “As there was not a lot that was known about this family, the script had to be pieced together,” Liu says. “In some ways, it’s a little bit of a thriller, because people know the final act and some of the details, and then the rest had to be kind of filled in, in order to understand the dynamic between Irene and her son.”
Irene’s husband had been diagnosed with brain cancer and died very soon afterwards, and this seemed to have triggered their son’s schizophrenia. At the same time, Irene had also been diagnosed with cancer. “She had become very fragile and aged enormously in that time.”
For an actor usually associated with action scenes and dynamism, Liu is almost unrecognizable as Irene, shuffling painfully and speaking heavily accented English, but she downplays the transformation. “I think her physical suffering was nothing compared to her emotional suffering. From the acting point of view, it was important to show the love, and her will, because her strength was coming from her will, her will to stay alive and to be vibrant for her son. That was the act of love. If you just were told the elevator pitch, you could walk away saying, this woman is a monster, right? Yes, like, ‘Who would want to watch that?’ But that’s not the theme of the story. The theme is love.”
Would she like to produce more films? “Producing is hard, right? So I’d have to really love the project as I love this one. I think that it’s such an important thing to be passionate about what you do so that you can feel connected to it from the ground up. And I would love to continue doing things that are not just commercial movies. I do have some things coming up.”
Liu also feels taking control is not just deciding what to do but also to not necessarily have to do anything. “I don’t feel like I have to necessarily keep running on the treadmill at the same rate,” she says. “Sometimes it’s actually faster than I thought it would be, but sometimes I can also step off. I never thought I could do that before, but actually, everything stopped during the pandemic, and we’re still breathing. And I think that’s something maybe we forgot. The scaffolding is always there that we are. We remain who we are, and if anything, it’s strengthened us. Not unlike Irene, the question is: how much can you endure?”
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source uk.news.yahoo.com ’
