Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

recommended

by Cindy Fuchs

The single most stunning moment in Ang Lee’s scrupulously artful martial arts film comes early. It’s a fight scene between expert Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and graceful young upstart Jen (Zhang Ziyi). The confrontation comes at night — mysterious, romantic and shadowy — and as they reel and kick their way over rooftops and up tall courtyard walls, the combatants match wits as well as outrageous combat abilities. It’s the movie’s first fight scene, and it’s stunning because, no matter how much you’ve heard about the film — likely a lot, given its impossible-to-live-up-to buzz — you can’t quite anticipate how cool it is to see.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes with all kinds of context. The result of Lee’s longtime desire to make a kung fu movie to beat all kung fu movies, to do justice to and also outdo the action and themes in the pictures he has so loved for years, the film also emerges from his belief that the genre needs refinement and gloss if it’s to get inside the Western art-house theaters that have so warmly welcomed his movies (from Eat Drink Man Woman and Sense and Sensibility to The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil) in the past.

There’s no doubt that the director knows his business, as the universal adulation for Crouching Tiger attests. Critics have hailed Lee’s celebration of fiercely independent women, cinematographer Peter Pau’s ravishing Chinese landscapes, and Hong Kong director/Matrix choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping’s breathtaking wireworked kung fu fighting. Still, it’s worth noting that knowing how the business works and how to work it is a different thing than changing or even challenging that business.

For all its visual and narrative scope, Crouching Tiger is actually the result of multiple compromises. And to a point, it thematizes that process, presenting characters who must make difficult choices and settle for less than they desire. The script by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung, is based on one section of a lengthy five-part novel by Wang Du Lu, and initially concerns the relationship between Shu Lien and her longstanding love, renowned Wudan swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat). Upon returning from a life-altering mountain-top meditation, Li decides to retire from fighting, and asks Shu Lien to look after his legendary sword, the Green Destiny, while it’s en route to a revered community leader to whom Li has bequeathed it. Li exits the action (in real life, Chow left the shoot under contractual obligation to promote Anna and the King) and the sword is stolen, which means Shu Lien must take over the story’s center. She manages this very well, both in her subtle psychic pain and her several fight scenes with Jen and with the girl’s teacher, the notorious renegade warrior Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), who holds something of a grudge against their early 19th-century, male-dominated martial-arts-and-mediation traditions, and who has passed on her resentment to her prize pupil. (Jen’s own umbrage at any number of rules and expectations eats at her throughout the film). As it happens, Jade Fox also murdered Li’s master years ago, which insures that she’s not the only one looking for revenge. Indeed, in his battle with Jade Fox, Li displays a rage that otherwise remains below his simmering surface.

But Li is mostly background here, one cause of Shu Lien’s hauntedness. Her increasingly complex relationship with Jen is most compelling, built as it is on mutual admiration and fierce competition. When they first meet, Jen seeks advice on her own upcoming marriage, which has been arranged by her wealthy father. The girl craves what she sees as Shu Lien’s lifelong freedom, but Shu Lien suggests that she do as she is told. The privileged and not-so-sensitive Jen misses that Shu Lien has also paid a price for her autonomy, namely, her unfulfilled desire for Li. And it’s here that the film develops its primary conflict: the contest between generations. Where Li and Shu Lien are definitively Old School in their behaviors and loyalties (they’ve been too busy fighting various good fights to consummate their mutual passion), Jen is fiery and ambitious, self-centered and impetuous, qualities made visible in her fight scenes — for instance, one where she adroitly outleaps, outkicks and outchops an entire crew of rough-and-tumble bandits who understandably mistake her for a boy.

Jen is so charismatic that the movie can break its stately stride midway to follow her on an extended flashback that has nothing at all to do with Li and Shu Lien, the film’s ostensible leads. The flashback reveals why Jen is reluctant to wed her appointed mate by showing her secret romance with a dashing desert bandit named Lo (Chang Chen). When he steals her comb, she pursues him on horseback, they fight a bit, and he takes her captive. After a few days inside the cave where he keeps her, they give in to their reciprocal passion in a steamy love scene. Not only are the two young stars lovely to look at, but their sexy playfulness has a robust energy that the super-reserved Li and Shu Lien can’t quite achieve. Even if the terminally aristocratic Jen can’t manage a selfless commitment to her man, she does, for this moment, appear to let go.

And so it is that Jen’s inability to engage emotionally ends up mirroring the reserve that weighs on both her would-be mentors. Li — about to retire — wants to take her as a student (in measure to get back at Jade Fox) and Shu Lien, though more reluctant to teach her for obvious reasons (Jen keeps kicking her ass), agrees that she is a prodigious talent who would benefit from discipline. The film appears slightly less convinced that a strict adherence to tradition is propitious, invested as it is in showing the lamentable consequences for the elder warriors. But such regret is, to an extent, the focus of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. True to its title, the movie is more concerned with everlasting possibilities, with repressed desires and emotional ambiguities, than with those amazing action scenes everyone is so crazy for. Such emphasis on indirection is underlined by the women’s primacy in the film. While rowdy, super-popular kung fu movies have long honored the power and poetry of female fighters, this one makes the point clear enough that even art-house audiences might get it.

See the trailer!