After CTHD, you'll have no excuse to watch The Matrix ever again. This is kung fu, that was kung phooey.)
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"Make a wish, Lo."
-Jen, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"
The cinema has always been a wonderful medium for witnessing the marvel of bodies in dexterous motion. In action films, little can compare with the grace of two actors engaged in deadly, desperate combat. What a wonderful gift it is, then, to have seen "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." "CTHD" is the kind of movie that puts everything (and everyone) else to shame. (After "CTHD," you'll have no excuse to watch "The Matrix" ever again. This is kung fu, that was kung phooey.)
In the film, master warrior Li Mu Bai (megastar Chow Yun-fat) vows to lay down his sword, the Green Destiny, after years of toiling in the Jianghu world of swordsmen and outlaws. He asks Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), his longtime friend, to take the sword to Beijing as a gift to an old friend, Sir Te (Lee-regular Lang Sihung).
In Beijing, Yu Shu Lien meets Jen (newcomer Zhang Ziyi, in a phenomenal, memorable, star-making performance), the daughter of a provincial governor. Jen and her family are guests at Sir Te´s until she is married. However, Jen tells Yu Shu Lien about her desire to remain free, to love and to live as she pleases. She hates the fact that noblewomen can look forward to little except arranged marriages and a lifetime devoted to serving their husbands´ families.
We get about fifteen minutes of leisurely exposition at the beginning of the film, atypical for something in this genre. Usually, a martial-arts flick opens with a big fight, but "CTHD" doesn´t mind segueing slowly into its rich story.
Suddenly, though, the film bursts to life. A thief is seen stealing the Green Destiny from Sir Te´s study, and the theft sets the rest of the film in motion. All of a sudden, a whole slew of characters show up in the commotion, including Li Mu Bai´s old foe, Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei, a veteran of Hong Kong martial arts flicks and the first to portray female warriors equal to their male counterparts). There is an extended flashback to the time when Jen was in the Gobi Desert and met her true love, a nomad named Lo (Chang Chen, a rising star from Taiwan). Heck, we even get two love stories in one movie.
The complex script is adapted from one in a series of novels written in the 1930s by Wang Du Lu. Co-writer James Schamus once described the arduous odyssey of first translating the plot synopsis from Chinese into English, then writing the script in English, and finally translating everything back into Chinese again for the dialogue. The talented screenwriters retained the richness of the layered narrative while making the progression of events clear to the audience. One does not need any prior experience with the Chinese language or culture to understand, and to feel, the swell of emotions in "CTHD."
The fight scenes are, in a word, tremendous. The actors do their own stunts, and they kick ass. They kick so much ass that, at the Cannes Film Festival in May, usually jaded film critics at the 8:00 AM screening actually stood up and applauded at the end of the first nocturnal courtyard fight. The actors aren´t fighting as much as they are dancing with one another, and they even defy the laws of gravity when they end up, yes, "flying" over rooftops and trees.
One must keep in mind, however, that the fight sequences in "CTHD" are not mere set pieces designed to give audiences more bangs for their bucks. Rather, they express philosophical points: the warriors fight as if in celebration of the individual spirit, and the women fight as well as the men. Indeed, "CTHD" is the ultimate chick flick, an intelligent retort to the thudding stupidity of "Charlie's Angels." (Incidentally, Hong Kong martial arts expert Yuen Wo Ping, a celebrated filmmaker in his own right, did the choreography for this film, and his brother worked on "Charlie's Angels.")
There is a scene in "CTHD" where Jen takes on an entire tavern full of martial arts masters. This sequence is Lee´s nod to the genre´s tradition of the "barroom brawl." One by one, Jen beats down her opponents. In the process, she demolishes the restaurant for good measure. When a monk demands to know her name, Jen replies with a mini-epic poem that gives her mythical stature. Zhang Ziyi´s perfect Beijing accent liltingly captures the beauty of spoken Mandarin (sorry, this is the one place where the subtitles can´t capture the musical eloquence of the language). By turns witty, comical, and literary, the five-minute moment is a delightful marriage of word and image.
In contrast, "Charlie's Angels" has a similar scene that offers nothing to the viewer. Drew Barrymore also takes on a roomful of bad guys, but rather than saying anything with literary heft, she declares each of her fighting stances and ends with "And that´s kicking your ass!" It was offensive, to say the least, having to sit through that dreary bombast.
While Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh headline the cast, the film really belongs to Zhang Ziyi. She manages to make us care about Jen´s spirited rebellion and coming of age story without making the character annoyingly petulant. Zhang makes great use of her youthful features, at first luring then honestly earning our sympathies. Hers is, by far, the best performance of the year, male or female.
Director Ang Lee said that making "CTHD" is the fulfillment of his childhood fantasies--having grown up in Taiwan, he voraciously read as many "wuxia" (martial arts) novels as he could. In contemporary Western cultures, we have become accustomed to our kids emulating the tough-guy coolness of literary and cinematic bad guys such as gangsters and hoodlums (no one pretends to be Sherlock Holmes or Sir Lancelot in this day and age). Yet, in Eastern societies, children still cling to tales of heroic derring-do and imagine themselves to be righteous warriors defending the moral health of the land. The "wuxia" world still plays an important part in Chinese culture as evidenced by the steady diet of "wuxia" novels and movies streaming out of Southeast Asia. After gaining attention for acclaimed English-language features such as "Sense and Sensibility" and "The Ice Storm," Lee felt that the time was ripe for him to "return to his roots." (Note: Lee directed every one of the films for which Taiwan received Best Foreign Film nominations--"The Wedding Banquet," "Eat Drink Man Woman," and "CTHD").
There have been some gripes from a few quarters that "CTHD" is not a "pure" endeavor, that it is too Westernized and inauthentic compared to previous martial-arts films. After all, neither Chow Yun-fat nor Zhang Ziyi knew any martial arts before making the movie. Chow and Yeoh´s accents are readily noticeable by native speakers of Mandarin, and Yeoh actually doesn´t even read Chinese (her first language being English, she learned her dialogue phonetically). Heck, the actors are from all over the place: Chow, Hong Kong; Yeoh, Malaysia; Zhang, mainland China; Chang, Taiwan. And, although composer Tan Dun and cellist Yo-yo Ma are both Chinese, the music that they bring to the film comes courtesy of Western instruments. In a sense, these are legitimate concerns.
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