If you’re not a fan of martial arts epics, director Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon might be the film that converts you. You wouldn’t think high-flying kung fu and sword-slinging would be suitable fodder for the storytelling gifts of the man who brought you Sense and Sensibility. But then again, this isn’t your average whup-ass import with bad dubbing: It’s an epic love story with a strong feminist bent. Even better, Crouching Tiger won’t scare off die-hard fans of the genre who like these films heavy on the action — it’s packed with gravity-defying fight scenes that’ll make your head spin.
One dark night, a legendary sword is stolen from Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), a highly skilled warrior. It’s up to his fellow fighter and longtime friend Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) to get it back. Shu Lien pursues a masked thief, leaping amazingly from walls to treetops until she catches up with the culprit, who turns out to be another woman, Jen (radiant newcomer Zhang Ziyi), daughter of the local governor. She’s hotheaded, willfully independent, and quick with a sword — essentially a younger version of Shu Lien herself. But what really resonates for Shu Lien is Jen’s tale of heartbreak. Though her father wants to arrange a marriage, Jen longs to be in the arms of her lost lover, Lo (Chang Chen), a rough-and-tumble bandit. In Jen’s story, Shu Lien hears echoes of emotions she has long tried to repress. Secretly, she loves Li Mu Bai, who has given up his old life to revisit the mountain where Jade Fox, a notorious female rogue, once poisoned his teacher to death.
In the dreamscape of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the women do all the work. It’s a particularly gutsy move in light of the movie’s overwhelmingly macho genre and from a filmmaker whose native culture incorporates a decidedly non-Western view of gender roles. And flying (literally) in the face of the cartoonish leaps and somersaults of Charlie’s Angels and its ilk, in Lee’s fantastical world, it seems convincingly natural for our heroines and their opponents to walk up walls or glide over water. Once again, fight maestro Yuen Wo-Ping (The Matrix) displays his peerless gift for staging dazzling acrobatic action. Some of the combat sequences, especially Shu Lien’s first encounter with Jen, drew spontaneous ovations from the audience I saw the movie with.
Admirably, Crouching Tiger also attempts to provide real emotional arcs for its characters. They aren’t mere bloodthirsty duelists, but soulful warriors fighting for their chance at love. But in this regard, critics have already vastly overpraised this film. Ang Lee has always made films about flawed people struggling against social convention (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm), but here, his script is frequently weighed down by humorless discussions of Taoist philosophy and self-consciously swoony, tragic-romantic twists and turns. It’s a big comedown from the top-flight fight sequences, and anyway, it’s in their physicality that these thieves and warriors best express themselves. Whenever Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon resorts to flying fists or soaring sword battles, the Force is definitely with it.