As ferrous as Margaret Thatcher but as elegant as the trademark flowers in her hair, “The Lady” is the Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, who gets her due in an appropriately respectful and dignified biopic.
Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh) lost her father, a general credited with shepherding Burma to independence from Britain in 1947, to a political assassination when she was only 2. After spending many years in exile and marrying a British academic, Michael Aris (David Thewlis), with whom she had two sons, she returned home and was persuaded to try to steer the country into democracy in the late ’80s after a military ruler agreed to step down. Instead, she was nearly shot, nearly died again in a hunger strike meant to ease the plight of fellow dissidents and was forced for many years to live under house arrest, during which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (At the moment, she is free in Burma.)
Suu Kyi’s story is moving and important, but the film is unlikely to draw a wide audience. Director Luc Besson (taking a welcome break from his hyperkinetic action films) strikes a tone of a sort of hushed worship, and doesn’t quite surmount the problem of how to dramatize inert situations such as being a prisoner of one’s own home. Dutiful and reverent are adjectives rarely associated with great filmmaking. Still, “The Lady” captures the grace and courage of its noble subject.