Where most martial arts films would immediately dive into the action, Lee and his screenwriters spend 15 minutes carefully establishing the intrigue over the fabled “Green Destiny” sword and the unrequited love between Li Mu Bai (Chow), the warrior who possesses it, and Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh), a longtime friend and formidable fighter in her own right. The crucial point is that Crouching Tiger is a drama with martial arts elements rather than vice versa, and that Lee, long admired as an actor’s director, sought foremost to get multi-dimensional performances out of Hong Kong icons Chow Yun-tat and Michelle Yeoh. Crouching Tiger should not have felt like such a huge departure from a dabbler of Lee’s talents, and it certainly shouldn’t feel like one now, when he would go on to emphasize the isolation and psychological torment of Bruce Banner in his underrated “Hulk” and champion high-frame-rate spectacle in recent films like Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk and Gemini Man. Or, as Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times called it, “Sense and Sensibility with a body count”.Īfter scoring early crossover hits from his native Taiwan like The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, Lee arrived in Hollywood with an interest in multiple genres, from the period fineries of Sense and Sensibility and the 70s-set The Ice Storm to the civil war drama Ride with the Devil, which doubled as a revisionist western. It’s something much more audacious, an effort on Lee’s part to infuse the genre with his own preoccupations with repressed love and culture clash. Lee wanted to be faithful to that tradition – he insisted that his longtime screenwriter, James Schamus, stay true to the tenor of the dialogue in Hu’s films – but Crouching Tiger isn’t a simple act of mimicry or an attempt to sell an authentic version of Chinese cinema to an international audience. The fight scenes are choreographed with exquisite grace by Yuen Woo-ping, whose work on The Matrix had wowed audiences the previous year.For many in the English-speaking world, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a mainstream introduction to a wuxia tradition that had been mostly relegated to cultists who haunted repertory circuits or picked up bulk VHS dubs of classics by King Hu, Tsui Hark and the Shaw brothers. The scenery, taking in Qing-dynasty Beijing, the ghost city of Xinjiang and other extraordinary Chinese locations, is magnificent. No wonder: you could lose the subtitles and still be transfixed by the film's visual delights. ![]() Shot with Chinese actors speaking Mandarin, but co-written by US writer James Schamus, Crouching Tiger was received indifferently in Asia but proved immensely popular in the west, winning four Oscars and becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history. People who'd have never dreamed of watching martial arts found themselves debating the finer points of wuxia, the fighting style that allows its practitioners to defy gravity and soar above rooftops. ![]() Hardened critics at Cannes greeted fight scenes with excited applause. ![]() ![]() In 2000, a knockout blow for the venerable martial arts movie was visited upon unsuspecting western audiences by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee's exhilarating addition to the genre.
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