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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Soundtrack (from my CTHD site)

Over the past years there has been a growing buzz about one of director Ang Lee's greatest films ever. It's full of martial arts, it's a period drama and it stars two of the East's best exports. Somewhat amazingly, such a combination has got four Oscars at the Academy Awards (I think it was nominated for seven) and also received further awards.

But like many people, I don't rely on awards. To me they don't mean a lot. Why? I have no precise answer for that, but how for example comes that a movie like Shrek receives two Oscars and another one like The Shawshank Redemption doesn't receive a single one, although being nominated for seven (if I am remembering correctly). Enough of my trash talk. Let me talk about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The film is set in the venerable Qing dynasty, with China being a world on the brink of change: soon, Western powers will force the country open for the opium trade, and in so doing put an end to an immense unified empire. By Western count, it is the early nineteenth century. But this is already a land rich in history.

The legendary warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) and the beautiful Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), a woman fighter, suffer the torment of undeclared love. He is undefeatable; she, superbly skilled - and her country's most renowned female warrior. Both have pursued justice for their people over personal fulfillment.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is adapted from a four-volume novel by Wang Du Lu published at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a rapidly changing social order made Chinese readers pine for the bygone days of the Qing dynasty, a time of Taoist values - and brought about a growingly popular genre, the wuxia, which chronicled the heroic deeds of martial arts heroes and reaffirmed the apparent simplicity of another time. The title Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon draws upon an ancient Chinese saying, a proverb used to characterise situations and places wherein there dwell hidden heroes and legends - and where nothing is as it seems. Within a brave warrior there lurks a man unable to declare his love, the seeming calm of a woman fighter conceals the inner turmoil of her yearning and a young aristocrat betrothed to a dull man finds it within herself to rebel.

Marking Ang Lee's first Chinese-language feature since 1994's Eat Man Drink Woman, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is punctuated by beautifully conceived fight scenes. Through the magic of dazzling stunts masterminded by Yuen Woo-Ping, the characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are seen leaping from tree-top to tree-top, diving spectacularly into water to recover a sword, and running suspended in space along the walls of an otherwise impenetrable compound. But for all the breathtaking action, the film ultimately touches upon the simple, universal themes of integrity, truthfulness to oneself - and the pursuit of true love.

The film had a five-month shoot spanning spectacular locations in mainland China, from the remote Flaming Mountain of Xinjiang to the Beijing Film Studios in the elegant metropolis; from Devil City to the mysterious peaks of Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain) and the country's majestic deserts and glacier valleys.

Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh and Ang Lee, all of whom have made significant in-roads into Western cinema have somewhat returned to their roots with this film. Chow made his Hollywood debut in The Replacement Killers and before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon he was seen opposite Jodie Foster in the epic Anna And The King. Yeoh is best known to Western audiences for her role in Tomorrow Never Dies. Lee - who garnered Academy Award Nominations for 1992's The Wedding Banquet and for Eat Man Drink Woman - has met with considerable success exploring a wide array of settings in his English-language films: from Jane Austen's quaint England in the Oscar-winning Sense And Sensibillity to the American suburbia of the morally combustible 1970s in The Ice Storm. His recent drama Ride With The Devil, in turn, tackled the American Civil War.

"It was an enormous privilege for me to make this movie," says Ang Lee, who talks about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as "Kind of a dream of China, a China that probably never existed, except in my boyhood fantasies in Taiwan."

The martial arts world of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - which marks a new genre for Lee - is a direct result of the very fantasies that ultimately fostered the project.

"Of course, my childhood imagination was mainly fueled by the martial arts movies I grew up with," says the director, "and the novels of romance and derring-do I read instead of doing my homework. That these two kinds of dreams should come together now, in a film I was able to make in China, is a happy irony for me. My team and I chose the most populist, if not popular, genre in film history - the Hong Kong martial arts film - to tell our story."

"In the previous martial arts films that I've done, we have always put loyalty, honour, tradition and martial arts ahead of everything else, but [Ang] deals with inner emotions like fear, and death, which is something that we've touched on, but we have never truly explored in that way," Michelle Yeoh explains.

"We used this pop genre almost as a kind of research instrument to explore the legacy of classical Chinese culture. We embraced the art form with the greatest mass appeal and mixed it with the secret martial arts as passed down over time in the great Taoist schools of training and of thought. What is the Tao, the 'way'? Of course, if you can say it, it's not the real Tao. It's enigmatic, in that it can only manifest itself through contradictions, through the conflicts of the heart rather than through the harmony it seeks."

Certanly, one aspect that allows Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to successfully intertwine drama and martial arts is that at its core are strong women who drive the conflict on both levels. "The martial arts film is very masculine," says Lee, "but our film finds its centre in its women characters. It is the women who in the end are walking the path of the 'way'."

Also, check out my Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-website. I haven't worked on it for quite some time now, but you can find lots of stuff and downloads there. It is in German, though, but you might want to have a look at it.

Written on May 31st 2002

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