Martial artiness

Action speaks loudest in Crouching Tiger

By Gary Susman

*** Directed by Ang Lee. Written by Wang Hui Ling, James Schamus, and Tsai Kuo Jung, based on the novel by Wang Du Lu. With Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Cheng Pei Pei, and Lung Sihung. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

HOLDING BACK? Yeoh and Chow can’t wait till they’re leaping and clashing again.

You’ve never seen anything quite like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon before. If you’re a lover of art-house and foreign films, you’ve never seen a film of such delicacy and decorousness that also offers such heart-stopping action sequences. And if you’re a Hong Kong–movie cultist, even one accustomed to female-driven action movies, you’ve never seen these conventions wedded to such lofty-minded artistry. Even if you’re a fan of Hollywood action spectacles, you’ve still never seen sequences like the ones here, which literally take flight above even such envelope-pushing fare as The Matrix. The combination of Hong Kong–style storytelling, state-of-the-art action, and director Ang Lee’s own art-film preoccupations doesn’t always mesh, much less soar. But when it does, you’ll be stunned and overwhelmed.

Lee, who’s made a career of hopping among languages, cultures, and historical periods (contemporary New York and Taipei in The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, Jane Austen’s England in Sense and Sensibility; ’70s suburbia in The Ice Storm), has maintained some constant themes in his work; generational conflict, moral education, and especially the social and sexual strictures against which his strong-willed female characters chafe. In last year’s awkward Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, he spent as much time in the drawing room as on the battlefield. Crouching Tiger Ÿepresents a much more successful fusion of comedy of manners and action drama; co-writer/co-producer James Schamus’s much-repeated description of the film as “Sense and Sensibility with martial arts” doesn’t really begin to describe the achievement.

Lee has inspired some career-best work in his team of Asian legends, including charismatic superstars Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh, pioneering 1960s Hong Kong martial-arts star Cheng Pei Pei, cinematographer Peter Pau, and fight choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping (finally recognized in America for his work on The Matrix). Yuen sends the characters, most of them sword-wielding, Jedi-like warriors, leaping up the sides of buildings, hopping across rooftops, skipping like pebbles across lakes, vaulting to the tops of trees, and casually defying gravity like some combination of Peter Pan, Gene Kelly, and Spider-Man. But it’s all done in the service of character and plot. Each fight is the characters’ way of expressing what they dare not talk about — revenge, arrogance, bitterness, yearning, even love. The sequences are both thrilling and lovely, and they’re likely to make any audience break out into spontaneous applause.

Unfortunately, when the characters aren’t soaring, the movie often remains earthbound as well. The story, based on one part of a five-part novel by 1930s writer Wang Du Lu, is a labyrinthine tale of intrigue in a mythical 19th-century China. The ostensible main characters — Giang Hu warrior-knights Li Mu Bai (Chow) and Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh), take a back seat to the story of Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), a governor’s daughter who longs to be a Giang Hu warrior but is engaged to marry another aristocrat. She also longs to be reunited with her secret lover, a swashbuckling desert bandit called Dark Cloud (Chang Chen). The MacGuffin is Mu Bai’s sword, a magnificent 400-year-old weapon called “Green Destiny”; when it’s stolen, Mu Bai comes out of retirement to join his friend Shu Lien in recovering it from the likely thief, Mu Bai’s old nemesis Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei). Much is made of the warrior code, the struggle between teachers and their resentful disciples, and the battle between the good and evil sides of the Giang Hu Force over Jen Yu’s soul.

All this is enacted in an archaic Mandarin dialect that is foreign to Lee and his mostly Cantonese- speaking cast, so it’s no wonder that his stars, especially Chow and Yeoh, seem to be holding something back. Granted, the plot demands it; Mu Bai and Shu Lien have never acted upon their feelings for each other out of respect for her fiancé, who died saving Mu Bai’s life. Still, the adherence to protocol isn’t all that stifles these characters. Chow, Yeoh, and especially the stunning ingénue Zhang smolder intensely but to limited effect. They can’t wait until they’re leaping and clashing again, and neither can you.