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.