A sword by itself rules nothing. It only comes alive in skilled hands ✵ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - SMALL WORLD ✵ 1992–PRESENT - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Wuxia (martial arts)

DIRECTOR

Ang Lee

WRITERS

Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus, Tsai Kuo-Jung (screenplay); Wang Dulu (story)

STARS

Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen

BEFORE

1991 Once Upon a Time in China, starring Jet Li, starts a craze for wuxia movies in Asia.

1993 Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet is Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language film.

AFTER

2004 Zhang Yimou’s visually stunning wuxia movie House of Flying Daggers, also starring Zhang Ziyi, is clearly aimed at Western audiences.

Movies including Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), and Ride With the Devil (1999) propelled Ang Lee to the A-list of Hollywood directors. So it was a brave move to make his next project a martial arts movie set in ancient China with dialogue entirely in Mandarin Chinese. Yet Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon justified the risk.

The movie is based on a wuxia novel, written in the 1930s by Chinese author Wang Dulu, the fourth title in his five-part Crane-Iron Series. In the US and in Europe, the movie was an instant critical and commercial hit, and won the Oscar for best foreign film. Critics noted the way it seemed to capture an idealized China, a China of dreams. As Ang Lee himself admitted, such a place never really existed. But the combination of romance, balletic martial arts sequences, and poetic cinematography created a movie that Western audiences engaged with. In China itself, however, the initial response to the movie was less positive, and an appreciation of its merits was slow in coming.

Among the best-known wuxia in the West are the Once Upon a Time in China series, which are regarded as some of the best of the genre. Many Chinese critics viewed Ang Lee, despite his Chinese roots, as a cultural tourist jumping on the wuxia bandwagon and getting it wrong. The martial arts sequences were tame, they complained. There was too much talk and not enough action. In their opinion, Ang Lee was pandering to Western audiences’ need for emotional involvement.

Yet engaging the audiences emotionally and psychologically is precisely what Ang Lee intended. He believed that the popular martial arts movies had barely begun to explore the true meaning of wuxia. To get to the heart of its role in the Chinese psyche, he felt he had to “use Freudian or Western techniques to dissect what… is hidden in a repressed society—the sexual tension, the prohibited feelings.” In other words, he consciously used a Western approach to filmmaking to uncover a psychological meaning behind the action.

"It’s a good exam—how to tell a story with a global sense."

Ang Lee

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Left unsaid

Most earlier wuxia movies pitched the viewer straight into the combat. However, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon opens with a five-minute-long dialogue between a noble swordsman, Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and a female warrior, Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). The story is set in the 18th century, during the Qing Dynasty. Li Mu Bai has retired from fighting and has joined a monastery as a path to enlightenment, but neither he nor Shu Lien can cast aside their love for each other, or confess their feelings. Both are constrained by notions of honor. These unspoken desires heighten the sexual tension between them. “Crouching tiger, hidden dragon” is a Chinese expression alluding to a situation full of danger.

In Lee’s movie, chief among these dangers is suppressed sexual desire. Just when Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai seem about to overcome propriety and declare their love, Li Mu Bai’s sword, Green Destiny, is stolen, and he suspects his elusive archenemy, Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei), the killer of his old master, to be the culprit. Before he can reveal his heart to Shu Lien, therefore, Li Mu Bai must recover Green Destiny and avenge his master’s death.

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Jen Yu is a skilled martial artist. After chasing Lo, a handsome bandit who has stolen her comb, she finds herself in his desert camp surrounded by brigands, and takes every one of them on in an acrobatic fight sequence.

“I would rather be a ghost drifting by your side as a condemned soul than enter heaven without you. Because of your love, I will never be a lonely spirit.”

Li Mu Bai / Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

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Jen Yu rejects Shu Lien’s offer of friendship and the pair duel. Shu Lien fights with every weapon available, but each is destroyed in turn by Jen Yu wielding Green Destiny.

WUXIA MOVIES

Wuxia stories are an old tradition in China. The word wuxia means chivalrous warrior, and first emerged during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Like the knights of European romances, wuxiacombined a quest for personal perfection with skill in combat. Ming and Qing rulers tried to suppress wuxia stories because of their emphasis on social justice, but they remained hugely popular. The first wuxia movies were made in the 1920s, but it was in the 1960s that they became a phenomenon in China. In the 1990s, Hong Kong filmmakers made the Once Upon a Time in China series, featuring the folk hero Wong Fei-hung (played by Jet Li).

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon changed the nature of wuxia in China, with movies such as Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004) telling a more psychological story than the earlier action-led movies.

Women warriors

At this point in the narrative, it becomes clear that Lee is making a second major departure from the wuxia movie tradition by putting women to the fore. The sword thief, who is shown leaping away across the rooftops of the Forbidden City in a spectacular aerial chase, is in fact Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), a fiery young noblewoman who has been secretly trained in brilliant but uncontrolled combat skills by the villainous Jade Fox, also a woman.

Li Mu Bai’s ally and his two adversaries are three strong women who all have major roles in the plot and the fighting. It is Li Mu Bai’s beloved Shu Lien who plays the customary male part of sublime swordsman with Zen-like emotional control. Jen Yu and Jade Fox are their out-of-control opponents.

Jen Yu is in violent rebellion against the social and chivalric conventions Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien live by. She is contemptuous of their self-discipline, or as she sees it, their self-repression. “Stop talking like a monk,” she retorts, when Li Mu Bai tries to advise her that the sword is a state of mind. She has taken a lover, Lo (Chang Chen), a bandit, with whom she is sexually intimate, and defies her family (unthinkable in China at that time) by escaping on her wedding night from an arranged, respectable marriage to a nobleman.

Jen Yu acknowledges that Li Mu Bai’s martial skills are greater than those of Jade Fox, and she wants him as her teacher. When he agrees, she says that he is only doing so because he desires her sexually.

Jade Fox was once a student of Li Mu Bai’s old master, but killed him when he tried to take sexual advantage of her. Her hostility as a character, and her fury and vengefulness, could also be sexual in origin. The entire story is driven by sexual undercurrents.

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By Hollywood standards, the budget for Ang Lee’s movie was small: $17 million. Studio executives were taken aback when it grossed $128 million in the US alone, and nearly $215 million internationally.

“Fighters have rules, too. Friendship, trust, integrity. Always keep your promise. Without rules we wouldn’t survive long.”

Shu Lien / Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Fantastical fighting

In another departure from genre tradition, the fighting scenes are not so much staged as choreographed, becoming extraordinary aerial ballets. In the most stunning sequence, with Li Mu Bai fighting Jen Yu amid swaying bamboos, the effect was not achieved with computer trickery but with the actors flying on wires. The result is enigmatic rather than violent, capturing the mystery and poetry of a mythical ancient China.

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ANG LEE Director

Born in 1954 in Taiwan, Ang Lee graduated from the National Taiwan College of Arts before moving to the US. His first critical success came with The Wedding Banquet, the first of several movies made with screenwriter James Schamus. Lee returned to Taiwan to make Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), a critical and commercial success. His adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility(1995), with a screenplay by the movie’s star, Emma Thompson, revealed his range. The tragedy The Ice Storm and the US Civil War drama Ride with the Devil (1999) were followed by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hulk (2003). He won an Oscar for Best Director with Brokeback Mountain (2005), about the gay relationship between two cowboys. A second Oscar came in 2012 with Life of Pi.

Key movies

1993 The Wedding Banquet

1997 The Ice Storm

2000 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

2012 Life of Pi

What else to watch: Once Upon a Time in China (1991) ✵ Drunken Master II (1994) ✵ Sense and Sensibility (1995) ✵ Hero (2002) ✵ House of Flying Daggers (2004) ✵ Brokeback Mountain (2005) ✵ Lust, Caution (2007) ✵ Life of Pi (2012)