Flower Power

Best known to Western audiences for her sword-wielding performance in 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Malaysian- born action queen Michelle Yeoh stars this month in a very different kind of film: Luc Besson’s The Lady (Cohen Media Group), in which she plays Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese politician, government protester, and Nobel Peace Prize–winner who was held under house arrest for 15 years before finally being released in November 2010. Yeoh is elegantly stoic in the film, which opens with a shower of bullets signaling the assassination of Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San. Nevertheless, the portrait of a pacifist serves as a meditation on the futility of violence.