Late in The Lady, Luc Besson’s biopic of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy dissident endures a painful moment of truth with her husband, Michael Aris, an Oxford academic, on the patio of the home where she has spent the better part of 21 years under house arrest.
Offering Aris release from a marriage that’s been sorely tested by the machinations of the military junta that has held her nation in thrall since its independence from Britain in 1948, Suu Kyi owns up to the stubbornness, impatience and bad temper that, she worries, have also played their part in keeping her separated from her family.
Aris, played by David Thewlis in full mad-professor hair and unaccustomed good nature, nods ruefully, but the rest of us will have to take his wife’s flaws on trust. In The Lady — an act of worship passing as character study — she has none, unless you count repeat performances of the Pachelbel Canon on the living room piano.
The accomplished actress Michelle Yeoh, who brought the project to Besson, is a regal beauty who brings off an uncanny resemblance to Suu Kyi largely through posture and the trademark flowers the activist wore in her hair. Yeoh has little else to work with, for the Aung San Suu Kyi we see in The Lady is pretty much torn from the headlines — a vision of smiling Gandhian equanimity, unfazed by threats or the gun-waving thugs sent by the generals to keep her from galvanizing the opposition.
Cutting between Oxford, where Suu Kyi’s husband and two sons remained for much of her de facto imprisonment, and Rangoon (now known as Yangon), the film frames her story as an agonized choice between family and country. Periodically set free, Suu Kyi walks among the people, and plans with activists and intellectuals for a freer Burma.