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| Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.,
(Wu hu zang long) |
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| Movies,
Patrick Dickinson,
15 January 2001 |
Rating: F4
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They say it’ll win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. They say it’s the first ever feminist martial arts film. They say a lot. Though they don’t tell you how to hide a dragon.
Crouching Tiger is genre flirting Ang Lee’s latest production, a double love story set in a mythical Chinese past where combat (and in Lee’s case cinematic spectacle) is king. Calling on a long history from King-Hu down via Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, Ang Lee has taken the most populist of film forms, the Hong Kong martial arts film, and polished it till the shine is almost blinding. Doing away with the typical kung-fu wire action fights, Lee has employed digital technology and martial arts expert Yuen Wo-Ping (who also worked on the Matrix) to create fight scenes of insane speed and skill. Weapons galore, more comic characters than you can shake a staff at, and stunts that rip the breath from you. The PlayStation 2 couldn’t do better, and Lee knows this.
At the core of this acrobatic action is the search for a stolen sword, the jade encrusted green destiny, recently given up by the most accomplished of martial artists, Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat). Around this grows a film of the repressed passion between Li Mu and fellow warrior Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), and the socially strangled love affair of maverick Lo (Chang Chen) and the princess like Jen (Zhang Ziyi).
The spilt narrative is engaging and reminds how a talented director can weave a colorful story with varied threads. But is the focus on the female leads that needs the applause. For in Lee’s world women are not the passive victims and objects of so many films. Here they fight and argue, love and chase. These women are active, and as Lee says himself it is the women not the men that are following the ‘way’, the Taoist path that drives the philosophical core of the film. A positive and forthright step towards a better cinematic culture.
Yet for all these good things the central message of the film is lost in the nutrasweetened final scenes. You feel that Lee sincerely believes in what he is saying and the intriguing thrust of his ideas certainly lingers. It is just a pity that the film’s last words, its last echoes, are let down by such saccharine effects and are so truly bathetic.
UK rating:
12
US rating:
PG
Ang Lee 2000 Hong Kong
Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Khan
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