Joy Luck Club, The

Loaded with heart, filled with life and completely entertaining, "The Joy Luck Club" is based on Amy Tan's best-seller, directed by Wayne Wang, with a screenplay by Tan and Ronald Bass ("Rain Man").

This rich and fully dimensional ensemble character study also boasts a first-rate cast of entrancing performers. And though the audience may not have seen many of these players before, there's no question that each will stay in the hearts and minds of those who are fortunate enough to see this film.

With any luck, "The Joy Luck Club" will be a major Oscar contender. (Certainly Wang should be nominated as director, and Tan and Bass for the script.)

Perhaps it should also be said up front that though the characters here are primarily Asian and there are extensive flashbacks to life in China, the relationships between the characters are truly universal.

The setting is modern-day San Francisco, at a party for June (Ming-Na Wen), who is about to embark on her first journey to China.

At this gathering we meet June's friends and relatives while, in flashbacks — and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks — eight human stories unfold, those of four women born into traditional Chinese culture and their adult daughters, all born as Americans.

Each of these stories is ultimately interwoven with the others as we observe the tragedies and triumphs experienced by these older women, and the traditions their daughters have, in some cases, chosen to ignore — or unwittingly embraced in a distorted form. How each comes to terms with these situations is the crux of the film. How the stories are told is the film's main strength.

June's mother, Suyuan (Kieu Chinh) has recently passed away without ever knowing what happened to the two baby daughters she was forced to abandon years before. Lindo (Tsai Chin) was coerced into an unhappy marriage as a teen, though she managed to gain freedom through her wits. The life of An Mei (Lisa Lu) was shaped by her widowed mother's tragic experiences as a concubine. And Ying Ying (France Nuyen) was an abused wife who spent much of her life in a self-imposed state of psychological punishment for an act she committed as a young mother.