Yan's lucid metaphors came from her own time in Tibet: "When I stayed with a bunch of herding girls -- young intellectuals sent down to herd military horses -- they taught me how to take warm baths." They used their black military raincoats as lining for a ditch, "because black will take the sun and absorb the heat." Lao Jin creates the same kind of outdoor tub for Xiu Xiu. (In June, Yan's "Celestial Bath" will appear in English in a collection called "White Snake," from Aunt Lute Press.) At the tale's climax, the ditch bath becomes a grave and, as Yan puts it, "a love bed."

Chen thinks "Celestial Bath" sounds so "porno," but now wishes she'd called her film "Sky Bath": "It's something people would have a question mark about; it would make them wonder, 'What's that?'" It would also link up with the rest of the water imagery in the movie. Every time Lao Jin fetches fresh water for Xiu Xiu, it registers as a baptismal rite, which is exactly what Chen wanted: "In China we use the word baptism a lot, it's a very revolutionary word -- 'baptism of blood,' 'baptism by storm.'"

Yan's lyrical transformation of those rituals in her story helped Chen conceive of it as a movie: "She wrote in a visual way," says Chen, "and it struck me as absolutely beautiful. After the girl was used by men, there was a description of her under the silver moonlight, with her boyish face and her body and hair all wet; Lao Jin comes and tries to give her some water and she seems almost like 'a newborn lamb.' I saw that she was a sacrificial lamb, the female sacrificial lamb of my generation."

To Chen, "The beauty in the story is at one with suffering. That is also part of our upbringing -- we don't think there could be beauty otherwise. Beauty is the result of having been through an experience all the way through to the end -- therefore it has a poignancy. Beauty that is singular always comes from following an experience to the point where you can go no further."

Chen took Yan's work with her when she served as a juror at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival. What made her give into "a bout of insanity" and decide to turn it into a movie was her reaction to the films she saw in Germany: "There were too many urban-despair, end-of-the-millennium, doom films. They offered doom without any elevation -- and doom that is not transfigured into spirituality is what I cannot accept. They were so urban and dark that I wanted to go out there to the Tibetan steppes and make a film that transfigures tragedy into something spiritual and transcendent."

Chen also felt the need to renew her own career: "I was frustrated. I was doing some bad movies, movies that I knew going in were not going to be great." She had gone from working with the likes of Bertolucci on "The Last Emperor" and David Lynch on "Twin Peaks" (1989) to co-starring with Steven Seagal in his directorial debut, "On Deadly Ground" (1994) and appearing with Sylvester Stallone in "Judge Dredd" (1995). Of course she understood actors: "Since age 14, I know what actors fear, what they like; I know how to get things out of them and I listen to them better, since I've been there." If she cast her film correctly, she was sure it would still be "captivating" -- even "if all else failed."

Chen roamed China on a talent hunt, but found her lead actress, Lu Lu, right in San Francisco. "By coincidence she had just moved here; her mother was an acquaintance of Geling's, and she goes to the English-language school for newcomers right on Broadway, near where I lived," Chen says. "We took her out of school and she seemed perfect. But I was totally scared of making a wrong decision there -- I knew how crucial she was for the film. Geling and I wrote scenes just for rehearsal, for her and Lopsang, the Tibetan actor, because we didn't want to lose all spontaneity on the set. And she delivered. Certain things she was able to grasp and understand by instinct, like falling in love; this is something a 15-year-old girl would understand. But she didn't want to do the sex scenes. The whole crew was in love with her and just hated me for making her do them, like I was the evil stepmother."

Yan says her "literary foundation" rests on Russian masters like Maxim Gorky ("He's cold and realistic but very romantic"); Chen says her acting foundation rests on Stanislavski. But she doesn't urge a single method on any of her actors. "I pick them because they are intelligent; I don't interrupt them to tell them what I think would work. Acting is actually private. Lu Lu's grandmother passed away during shooting, and she couldn't go to the funeral. During certain sad scenes, she wasn't thinking of what was in the script -- she was thinking of Grandmother, far, far away. As a director, I didn't tell her to think about that. But I allowed her the space to get at this most private feeling and deliver it."

Yet Chen says she also gave Lu Lu "some specific directions, because she was so young. I'd say, 'You can throw yourself on your bed, because you don't care, and rub the sole of your foot against your calf,' and the detail of the physical movement, expressing her complete callousness in front of another man, brought things out of her. You want actors to give you the essence of drama -- not only the gift of their instincts and knowledge but the greater gift of themselves. When that happens, it's gold -- and when you want to catch that, you don't go through all sorts of fancy camera movements to play director."

What marks Chen as a filmmaker to follow is more than her love for actors; it's also her ability to see them as part of an aesthetic whole. Even one of the movie's jarring flourishes -- its use of a city boy who had a crush on Xiu Xiu as a narrator, though he leaves the film after the opening sequence and couldn't possibly observe the actions he describes -- derives from her desire "to make the film visually more like a fairy tale, not in a school of Italian neorealism, or the grim realism of China. He'd always remember her by the day she said goodbye to him in the city. Time and distance have crystallized his memory of these events, and I thought that as he tries to re-create her story and piece it together, the night sky would loom bigger and be a deep luminous blue instead of a total pitch black, the flowers would be brighter, the grass greener. A conventional screenwriting class would say that this is a definite no-no: You have a storyteller who wasn't present during the story. But somehow Geling and I liked it as a different way of telling the story."

Despite her passion for moviemaking, Chen hasn't given up on performing. "Acting for me is not a bad habit like smoking that I must make an effort to quit. I love acting; I love directing." Did she consider taking a part and directing herself? "I was so stressed out I was glad there was no part for me in the script. In Tibet it would have been impossible to direct myself. I had one assistant director who was only with me for two-thirds of the movie, and the sun was so strong I looked like a Hiroshima victim. Every aspect of making this film has been exceedingly difficult, which is really wonderful. Because now I think I have done the hardest film of my life: Nothing can deter me, nothing can scare me anymore."
salon.com | May 27, 1999

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