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| CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. Starring - Chow Yun Fat - Michelle Yeoh - Zhang Zi Yi - Cheng Pei Pei - Zhang Zhen. Director - Ang Lee. 2000. In case you don’t know already, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is an idiom used to describe powerful people who hide their true strength, sometimes as a deception to trick their enemies. Why Ang Lee thinks a film called “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” featuring Mandarin speaking characters discussing martial art concepts will sell in the U.S. is beyond me, but it did. It’s unbelievable, especially if you consider that many of the ideas are absolutely alien to the average American audience. I am a Chinese born in Hong Kong, and I grew up watching television dramas that feature characters flying over rooftops. So I felt only reasonable when I saw Michelle Yeoh walking horizontally on walls. What amazes me is the way foreign viewers feel as natural as I do and accept readily everything they see on the screen, even those which I found myself laughing at (like Chow Yun Fat’s choice of words when he discusses his meditation session with Yeoh near the beginning). Maybe the Western audience are more open minded than I thought? Or do they feel obliged to like a subtitled “art house” film? I can imagine if I were born in America, I would be laughing my guts out. Therefore, you will be forgiven if you don't buy this film at all, even though it really is a great film (we don't, however, forgive people for not liking, say, “The Godfather.”) The so-called swordsmen in Chinese folklore are actually our modern day gangsters, except perhaps they act on a good cause. The curtain rises on master swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), who has recently decided to retire. The cause of his sudden decision seems to lie on his unspoken affection for his long time acquaintance Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). The two probably know how the other feels, but neither admits it. Then come the bad news. Mu Bai’s long time enemy, Jade Fox (a stupid name in both Chinese and English), has surfaced again and Mu Bai feels obliged to avenge the death of his master. During his pursuit, Mu Bai comes across Jade Fox’s apprentice, a young girl named Xiou Long, and decides to redeem her from her malevolent master. There aren’t many fight scenes in this film, but when they hit, they hit hard. The most breathtaking sequence is a high-speed rooftop chase, which demonstrates the very strength of the film. The camera never confuses chaos with excitement. Whilst the characters fight in a frenzy, we see very clearly each of their moves. There are even a few seconds that are shot in slow motion and you can almost see the “force” travelling from one character to the other. Whilst hardcore Hong Kong movie fans will almost certainly prefer Tsui Hark’s or Ching Siu Tung’s works over this, I think Yuen Wo Ping’s choreography here is one of the best and most meticulously shot I have ever seen. All the action, however, would have been pointless stunts had there not been a story to provide the backup. The most satisfying aspect of “Crouching Tiger” is hardly the rooftop chase, or the duel between Shu Lien and Xiou Long near the end, it is the parallel love affairs between Mu Bai and Shu Lien, and Xiou Long and a bandit she met called Xiao Hu (Zang Zhen). While the American romance between Xiou Long and Xiao Hu forms one of the low points of the film, the unspoken love between Mu Bai and Shu Lien has an almost tragic beauty in it. Although Chow Yun Fat’s Mandarin is lousy and his lines are a bit cheesy near the end, the way things are resolved between Mu Bai and Shu Lien is what gives this already great picture the depth of a mini-masterpiece. I am ready to give this film six stars for the ending alone. The making of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” involves efforts from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Hollywood and they seem to mix amazingly well together. Whilst everything on the screen is strictly Chinese, the film also owes much to modern western filmmaking techniques. We used to complain about the poor sounds and production glitches that flaw such excellent films like “Swordsmen” or “Ashes of Time.” These problems are all solved in “Crouching Tiger” because Hollywood has the resources to fine-tune every frame of the film. It’s already an event to celebrate given its achievement in the martial art aspect, and the fact that it is powered by an excellent story makes it almost too good to be true. 8********stars. © 2003 Geeky Marcus. NATURAL BORN VIEWERS. |
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