Stuntwoman, Bond girl, Oscar winner – Michelle Yeoh has lived many lives on screen. Across four decades, she has put her body on the line to become one of cinema’s most enduring action stars.
The actor is not acting. On the edge of consciousness, her eyes turn first toward the camera – to us. Then to the swarm of crew members that surround her. Then to the sky. Then they close again as she winces in pain. Special thanks scroll past her face to the left: Guinness (Hong Kong) Ltd., Aqua Pure Distilled Water, Panama Jack. Seven men attempt to hoist the mattress supporting her. She grips the covers – a child’s, decorated with colourful cartoon trucks. Her face morphs between states of contortion and calm.
Michelle Yeoh, performing a stunt for which she jumped off an overpass onto a speeding truck, had landed between two pads meant to cushion her fall. The incident was captured in an unbroken shot, the handheld camera continuing to roll up close and personal long after the take had been so disastrously botched. Serving as an addendum to Ann Hui’s The Stunt Woman, which was re-written around this near-fatal back injury, the footage plays along with a short description of the accident and a message reading: “We dedicate this film to her and all stunt people who help to bring excitement and action to our screens.”
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Though its sombre presentation and voyeuristic duration are certainly exceptional, the sequence is not without precedent. Premised on pushing the human body far past its limits, Hong Kong action cinema, in its fast-and-loose heyday of the 1980s and ’90s, frequently possessed a wealth of imagination and a lack of precaution. Jackie Chan, with his death-defying antics on the set of Police Story (1985), popularised the practice of ending films with stunt outtakes, showing off the grit and gumption behind these spectacular brushes with death. During the credits for one of Police Story’s sequels, in fact, we watch Yeoh – who regularly performed her own stunts – slide off the windshield of a moving car, which failed to shatter beneath her as planned, rolling backward toward oncoming freeway traffic. No stranger to disaster and danger, Yeoh retains composure even when, in the same montage, she misses her mark driving a motorcycle onto a moving train, flying out of frame. Her prowess seems god-given, but her persona – heart of gold, tough as nails, body on the line – is hard-won.
It began with Senior Inspector Ng (her first lead role, under the stage name “Michelle Khan,” which she would keep until her transition to Hollywood) in Corey Yuen’s Yes, Madam! (1985). Starring opposite Cynthia Rothrock as Scotland Yard inspector Carrie Morris, Yeoh plays good cop to Rothcock’s bad cop, though the two women eventually band together for some extrajudicial mayhem and bring a smarmy triad boss to justice. She sports an androgynous combination of boyish mullet, heavy makeup, and outrageously tacky attire, emerging immediately as the film’s gravitational centre despite the screenplay’s lack of trust in its female stars (long, but agreeably eccentric, detours focus on the fraternal camaraderie of three incompetent thieves).
The all-around classic’s 1987 sort-of-sequel, Royal Warriors, ups the ante on the blissfully outsized setpieces and positions Yeoh as its unquestioned star. But she’s still offset by two male costars and styled with a more modest elegance, which, if anything, makes her pugilistic presence all the more pronounced. Across the two films, a tension between Yeoh’s slightly tentative expressions and her completely unfettered athleticism animates these early incarnations of her image. She is both unstoppable force and immovable object, but she is also flesh and blood and denim and nylon and hairspray, an avatar of authoritative mischief.
A five-year marriage to producer Dickson Poon took her out of the game shortly after, but Police Story 3: Supercop gave Yeoh an explosive comeback in 1992. Featuring some of the finest, most irresponsible action you’ll ever see, stunt-coordinator-turned-director Stanley Tong’s film introduces a new element to Yeoh’s emotive palette: fear. As China’s Interpol director Jessica Yang, Yeoh grunts, yelps and gawks her way through absurd hazards and delirious violence, by turns relatably vulnerable and startlingly brutal in reaction to tangible danger.
Expanding on this vulnerability, Johnnie To’s delirious wirework superhero movie The Heroic Trio (1993) would give Yeoh the more morally complex role of Ching, who uses an invisible robe to steal babies and offer them up for brainwashing by her evil master. Pursued by Tung, a.k.a. Wonder Woman (Anita Mui), and reunited with Chat the Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung), Ching has a crisis of culpability and a change of heart, hinging on her romantic attachment to the robe’s doomed inventor (James Pax). With long flowing curls and an unforgettable scarlet get-up, Yeoh achieves the kind of imposing, sharp-edged femininity that eventually brought her success across the Pacific (though it would be quickly sapped of sensuality and vigor).
A spiritual summation of Yeoh’s career until that point, The Stunt Woman sets out to explore a landscape of rampant risk, but doesn’t go very far. Wide-eyed and ambitious yet playful and sensitive, Yeoh’s eponymous character Ah Kam hustles her way into a stunt unit, led by Master Tung (Sammo Hung, a stalwart action filmmaker himself). She becomes emotionally enmeshed with the crew despite various threats to life and limb; in addition to their everyday foolhardy feats, the film industry’s connections to the criminal underworld blow up in their faces during a poolhouse brawl with machetes. It breaks out when Tung is hit from behind; touching his back and finding blood, he shouts “this time it’s real!” in a close-quarters fight that’s ugly and unglamorous. Hui intercuts close-up shots of digital fighters from the arcade machines squinting out at this clumsy skirmish, a suggestive flourish that sticks out in a largely flat, dispassionate film. The juxtaposition briefly punctures the illusion of so-called “heroic bloodshed”. It’s the closest we get to a real critique.
The fateful stunt on the freeway, which made Yeoh reassess her career, was mirrored in the film itself. Ah Kam is pressured by Tung to perform the very same leap from the overpass, but, thrown off her game by a recent romantic betrayal, she hesitates. Still visibly nervous on the second try, he pushes her over the edge. The fear of falling now overcome, they reset, and on the third take, she dives dutifully and gracefully. As with other scenes in the film, peril and angst are present, but they are quickly brushed aside. From there, the crime plot pushes The Stunt Woman toward melodrama and easy catharsis, with only Yeoh – dramatic chops by now greatly matured – to anchor us.
After her recovery, she donned a more adaptable persona in 1997, starting with a Bond girl stint in Tomorrow Never Dies. Despite Yeoh’s protests, director Roger Spottiswoode did not allow her to perform her own stunts. More transnational prestige came with the blockbuster Taiwan-HK-China-USA co-production Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, which was the last true marriage of her actorly poise with her martial art mastery.
After 20 years of low-wattage, high-return supporting parts in Hollywood, Yeoh had been pigeonholed by the machine, her distinctive facets sanded down. Had her Oscar-winning role in Everything Everywhere All at Once gone to Jackie Chan (as originally intended by Daniels Kwan and Schienert), western audiences might have had a very different notion of the Malaysian performer’s talents. – Shot from the waist up in medium shots, Yeoh, who performs with the farthest reaches of her body, is a completely different actor. Given the physical tolls of her most immediate form of physical expression, however, it’s understandable that she would disappear into comfort. She’s earned it.
