Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon still leaps off screen

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/02/2023 (964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This weekend, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the haunting, ravishing martial arts film from Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee, returns to the big screen for a limited engagement.

You might be asking why a film originally released in 2000 is coming back now. CTHD — now in 4K restoration — could be hitting theatres because of the buzz around one of its stars, the magnificent Michelle Yeoh, currently considered a frontrunner for the best-actress Oscar for her work in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Another reason might be the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon television series that’s in the works. And director Lee is set to return to the martial arts genre with an upcoming Bruce Lee biopic.

But here’s the thing: any time is a good time to experience — or re-experience — this startlingly beautiful, achingly emotional film (in Mandarin with English subtitles). CTHD is one of the purest expressions of physical joy, romantic yearning and cinematic energy you’ll see at the movies — this year, or any year.

A hybrid Chinese-Hong Kong-Taiwan-Hollywood co-production, CTHD brought the wuxia film tradition to a wider audience in the West. While Asian viewers — and hardcore martial arts movie fans — recognized its many influences, the film was a revelation to most North American moviegoers. It won four Oscars, including best foreign language film, and racked up more than $213 million in global ticket sales.

Set during the Qing Dynasty, the story — based on a serialized novel by Wang Dulu and adapted by Wang Hui Ling, Tsai Kuo Jung and frequent Lee collaborator James Schamus — starts off when renowned fighter Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) vows to leave behind his life of violence. He entrusts his mystical sword, Green Destiny, to Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), to transport to Beijing. Even in their brief, quiet first scene together, anyone can see these two hold for each other deep feelings, long suppressed.

Once in the city, Shu Lien encounters Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who seems set to make a safe dynastic marriage but is, in secret, a fierce self-taught fighter. Gifted but undisciplined, she also has a hidden past with bad-boy bandit Lo (Chang Chen).

When Green Destiny is stolen by a masked thief, these characters must confront each other — and themselves.

Looking at themes of vengeance and honour, loyalty and love, fate and free will, CTHD is both epic and intimate. There’s also a clear feminist subtext, seen in the uneasy sisterhood between Shu Lien and Jen and in each woman’s attempt to make her own life.

And, of course, there are the standout action scenes from martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, whose work also entered into the North American mainstream through his hugely influential contribution to The Matrix. His fight scenes are precise and balletic, with occasional touches of slapstick. They can be physically intense, but they’re generally bloodless. When Jen bests dozens of lesser combatants during a teahouse donnybrook, for example, she embarrasses the men rather than slaughtering them.

CTHD’s wire-work scenes are now legendary, with characters skipping over water, flying over rooftops and running up walls. Perhaps the most gravity-defying and gorgeous sequence is the fight between Mu Bai and Jen set in an impossibly green bamboo forest, with the treetops bending and swaying beneath them.

As Lee stretches the limits of practical effects with a little bit of digital tweaking, it’s not just that these scenes hold up. If anything the passage of 22 years reveals how fresh and fun they are, in contrast to so many current CGI action sequences, which seem, in comparison, pointlessly big and loud and flat and generic.

It’s also interesting to place the film within the full range Lee’s oeuvre, not just what comes before CTHD but also after. Because he works in a range of genres, Lee sometimes seems to be all over the place. But from his Jane Austen adaptation (Sense and Sensibility) to his subversion of the American western (Brokeback Mountain) to his unusually broody comic-book film (Hulk), his work is almost always about the conflict between desire and duty, about the tension between individual needs and social constraints.

As Shu Lien says, “To repress one’s feelings only makes them stronger.”

And how. All these years later, that’s where the power of this restrained, elegant — and yes, kick-ass — movie lies.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com