Lurking behind all this diabolical action is Jade Fox, the woman who killed Mu Bai’s master. When a nimble thief swipes the sword under cover of darkness, it comes as no surprise to Shu Lien that Jen is the person responsible, but she and Mu Bai are not in a rush to condemn Jen, whose duplicity reads more like a young person’s ill-conspired rebellion. Meanwhile, the film introduces a third major character in Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), the beautiful and mysterious daughter of a well-heeled family, poised to enter reluctantly into an arranged marriage. The blood of the many slain by Green Destiny had washed too easily off the blade, and Mu Bai’s regret has hastened an early retirement, pending the safe placement of the sword with Governor Yu. After meditating on a mountaintop, Mu Bai confesses to Shu Lien that he “came to a place of deep silence”, surrounded by a feeling not of enlightenment but of “endless sorrow”. 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. ![]() ![]() ![]() 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.
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