The Lady

Luc Besson's film about Aung San Suu Kyi. It begins in 1988: a woman living in Oxford with an academic husband and two sons returns to Burma to see her sick mother and finds herself inside an uprising. What it puts at the centre is not politics but separation. When Suu Kyi chooses to stay she is placed under house arrest, knowing that if she leaves she will not be allowed back. When her husband Michael Aris develops cancer his visa application is refused, and he dies without seeing her again. Michelle Yeoh plays Suu Kyi. She studied Burmese for the part and worked at length on the physical resemblance. When Yeoh tried to enter Myanmar in 2011 she was turned back at the airport and deported. David Thewlis plays Aris. The film was made before Suu Kyi came to power and before the arguments over her position on the Rohingya. Watched now it is an incomplete portrait: accurate for the period it covers and unaware of what came after.