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Animal Magnetism
CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGGON
Yes, It's a Martial Arts Movie - and Lots More
With Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi
Screenplay by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling, Tsai Kuo Jung
Directed by Ang Lee
ALTHOUGH CHOW YUN FAT - the world's most famous actor and No. 1 box office star - naturally gets top billing in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, his character, the greatest martial artist of his time in ancient China, is much less interesting than the two women - one very young, one middle aged - whose stories get wrapped up in his.
The older woman, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), has served and loved the great Li Mu Bai (Chow) for many years and now has taken on a vital mission for him: Recovering the Green Destiny, Mu Bai's legendary sword. Determined to forsake his honorable fighting life - "Once you see it tainted with blood," Shu Lien says of the sword, "it's hard to admire" - Mu Bai gives the powerful weapon away. But an agile masked thief with incredible martial arts skills steals it from its new owner, and Shu Lien determines to get it back.
The younger woman, Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), is the 18-year-old daughter of a wealthy family that has pledged her in marriage to a businessman. But the impetuous girl wants no part of such a life: In fact, when she was just 4 years old, she secretly apprenticed herself to Jade Fox (the fearsome Cheng Pei Pei), a bitter old bandit/crone responsible for the death of someone close to Mu Bai. Worst of all, sweet little Jen was the thief who nabbed the Green Destiny - and Shu Lien, who becomes her surrogate big sister in the days before her wedding, knows it.
If you think you've seen this all before, then you're just as right as you are wrong. For director Ang Lee, adapting a novel by Wang Du Lu, has made an incredibly fun and imaginative movie filled with surprises, excitement and ceaseless delight. Set against the exquisite landscapes of ancient China, Lee's smart movie is complex in a simple way, a triumph of exotic packaging, high style and palatable ideas that don't overpower a thrilling action romance.
To the Chinese, the cultural legends of the martial arts resonate like the 19th Century Old West does to an American. In Lee's magical fairy tale, the actors literally fly across rooftops and through the trees during their martial arts fights in pursuit of one another, pausing often to allow their weapons to clatter and spark.
Think of this as The Matrix meets Sense and Sensibility (which Lee also directed), laid over with touches of Unforgiven (the fighter who wants to quit), Star Wars (the Green Destiny is part sword and part light saber), Yentl (girls who want to study), and all the Jackie Chan films you've ever seen, with plenty of high karate and a proto-feminist spin, scored with a mix of action music and some mournful cello solos performed by Yo-Yo Ma.
Lee has skipped from place to place in his filmmaking career so far. Ride with the Devil re-fought the Civil War, The Ice Storm took place in the American '70s, and Eat Drink Man Woman was a modern dysfunctional family drama set in his native Taiwan. He's an artist who likes to try things on, especially if they're outside of his immediate experience.
But at last a destination has started to emerge: As with Sense and Sensibility, his best film before now, Lee seems interested in how women with intellect, courage and ambition fought the expectations of their class and culture. In his adaptation of Austen, Lee could only go so far in upsetting propriety. But Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a story of myth and fantasy, which leaves him free to create women as dynamic as his men.
You can revel all you like in the majestic beauty of Chinese architecture, or in the movie's cornucopia of costumes, or in the burning erotic silence of the Gobi Desert, where we learn the story (told in flashback) of Jen's passion for Lo (Chang Chen), a raffish nomad/thief with a romantic soul.
Best of all in Crouching Tiger is its intimate story of desire - for love, for respect, and for a place in a world denied to those strong women capable of fighting their own battles. In Lee's world, the men are secretly gentler than custom allows, and the women much more fierce. And in the character of the girl Jen Yu, Lee explores the inevitable tension of a society that forbids any one of its members to pursue her destiny.
Filmed with breathtaking elegance and speed, Crouching Tiger boasts exceptional acting, the best of it coming from its leading women. As the meditative, unrequited Shu Lien, Yeoh's austere performance endows her character with a mighty dignity. And as the conflicted Jen, the expressive Zhang Ziyi creates a troubled woman whose battle for freedom is with her culture and herself.
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A Modern History
HERO
A Chinese director's tale of the past has high-tech touches
With Donnie Yee, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Jet Li
Co-written and directed by Zhang Yimou
IF IT'S POSSIBLE to overdose on visual beauty, then Zhang Yimou's Hero is an acid trip for the eyes: China's most renowned director films his historic martial arts fantasy-drama in a variety of hues - blood red, melancholy blue, lucent green - and stuffs it with almost other-worldly digital effects.
Still, for the first 45 minutes of Hero, I wondered why Zhang - who's made such powerful, original, or contemporary films as Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju and Not One Less - would bother with a genre and a style that's so been there, done that. From the acrobatics of The Matrix five years ago through the brutal generic deconstruction of Tarantino's Kill Bill, Zhang's movie feels somewhat dull and superfluous for about half of its run.
But then this great filmmaker comes up with the extra touches that give Hero the boost it needs. Without telling us at the start, Zhang reveals his tale in gradually unfolding layers of lies, conjectures and finally truths, somewhat like Akira Kurosawa's famous Rashomon. And for a contemporary touch, Zhang's fabled re-imagining of 2,000-year-old Chinese history provides a slightly dangerous (for him) critique of his native People's Republic.
Zhang completed Hero in 2002, two years after Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, released Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history (Lee returned to China to make it). It's no wonder Zhang's America distributor waited a while to release Hero: The films are similar, and certainly nobody wanted to see Zhang's film caught in a pointless pissing contest to declare one of them to be better than the other.
Hero takes place a few centuries before Christ, at a time when China is divided into seven very territorial and defensive kingdoms. The most powerful of them is ruled by Qin (Daoming Chen), its eponymous king, who dreams of uniting all of the kingdoms into a peaceful nation with a common language. But the subjects of the other kingdoms perceive him as conqueror, and some of their most powerful swordsmen resolve to assassinate the sanguinary monarch.
Qin's most threatening enemies are Long Sky (Donnie Yen) and the romantically involved duo of Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung). They've all tried to do the deed, and the powerful king lived to tell (as did his would-be assassins, who got away with their lives). Now the king's young protector - a fierce fighter, orphaned in childhood, who (shades of spaghetti westerns!) calls himself Nameless (Jet Li) - has returned to Qin with the claim that he's handily dispatched Sky, Snow and Broken Sword.
But as Nameless tells his story, King Qin remembers his own encounters with the putative dead, and he begins to doubt his new hero's word. In a steely dialogue between Nameless and Qin, with ample flashbacks to keep the action going, the truth comes out - and the true heroes emerge.
In Zhang's world, heroism is a matter of courage and principle, so the word "hero" covers both genders. It's also not black and white, which may account for his movie's sumptuous color schemes. By the time Hero ends, Zhang has re-defined the concept numerous times, giving balance and credence to his characters' different ways of enacting their ardent nationalism.
Zhang's movie takes the barest outline of Chinese history and spins it into a fabulous fable. Yet when its characters speak of a unified China, which Broken Sword believes should be called "Our Land," you know he's speaking to his country's current dictators, whose policies of economic openness - which have benefited only city dwellers, leaving the peasants more destitute than ever - have not followed suit with broader freedoms that should be the birthright of every man and woman on earth.
As for the action in Hero, it's all stuff we've seen before: They leap, they fly, they float, they walk on water, and they seem never to be able to kill one another, until the moment when they finally do. But remember that Zhang tells his story several times through, and so in Hero, there's dead, and then there's Dead.
The beauty of his fight scenes comes in both their obstructions and their commonplace fantastics. In one, Nameless lunges in slow motion through shimmering droplets of revivifying water; in another, the fighters battle among a tornado of leaves in which nature seems to want to impede the kismet of their adulterated human race. For a brief moment we get an arrow's-eye view as trident spears glide through the sky to meet their targets. And when a locust storm of arrows descends upon Snow, she fights them off with her sword and her red silk robes.
At a lightning 96 minutes long, Hero tells its story efficiently and espousing its themes concisely with a hand that stops just short of being heavy. It's a talky drama, with sufficient action to please the people who will see it mostly for the swordplay. It's also a near-prefect visual experience, which is never enough, but which in this case helps an awful lot.