The best thing I can say about
Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, directed by Ang Lee, is that it is probably the only good film
currently in release that can be recommended to just about anyone--with the possible
exception of jerks who hate foreign films with subtitles. The scenario skillfully
combines two separate but interrelated stories. At the beginning of the movie,
the renowned sword master Lu Mu Bai (Yun-Fat Chow) meets his female counterpart,
Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), and
hands over to her the legendary sword Green Destiny, which he asks her to give
to Sir Te (Sihung Lung), a nobleman residing in Beijing.
Although she has difficulty in understanding why
he wishes to relinquish the sword, she carries out his wish and conveys it to
Sir Te, who in turn proudly displays it to the recently arrived Governor Yu, whose
young daughter Jen (Zhang Ziyi) is about to marry into an even more prestigious family.
These
events, however, only serve to provide a framing story for the second tale which now
commences to develop with the theft of the sword from Sir Te's. This is theft is
blamed on the notorious lady criminal Jade Fox (Pei-pei Cheng), but the culprit is eventually
unveiled as the adventure loving Jen who not only turns out to be the protege of
Jade Fox but who also has been carrying on a hot clandestine affair with a
Manchurian bandit chieftain.
In spite of its not exactly juvenile subject,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a fairy tale with a decoratively shimmering
surface. The film has been lushly photographed by Peter Pau, and the incredible
location shots of China are well worth the price of admission by themselves.
Where else is anyone likely to see the Gobi Desert serve as background for
incidents in a motion picture? Like all fairy
tales, this one has a moral: about how Jen has to learn humility and reconcile
herself to the Way. But the message the film
delivers seems incommensurate with the imperially adorned messenger who has been
dispatched to deliver it.
This kind of picturesque fabulation is a far cry
from historical spectacles of Akira Kurosawa such as Seven Samurai (1954),
The
Hidden Fortress (1958) or Yojimbo (1961) , in which the action serves to bring
to the surface underlying social and ideological conflicts--for example, in
Seven Samurai the way the fundamental conflict between the farmers and the
samurai keeps reasserting itself, or in The Hidden Fortress the way the presence
of the two common soldiers keeps bringing the heroics of the Princess and the
General back down to a more quotidian level of survival. Compared to works like
Kurosawa's--to which I would even add Masaki Kobayashi's somewhat lesser Harakiri
(1962)--Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon never succeeds in going very far beyond the pretty surface
it creates.
More than anything else,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon is a movie about story-telling and here, I think, lies the film's
strongest point: in offering viewers the pleasure of following an exciting story
for its own sake. (The screenplay is by Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus, and Kuo
Jung Tsai from a book by Du Lu Wang.) It conscientiously adheres to such a
traditional procedure for unfolding a tale that it almost might serve as a
fabricated narratological model in a semiology class. Even when the movie
resorts to a flashback to explain how Jen came to know the bandit, I was more
reminded of one of the interpolated stories in The Thousand and One Nights
than of a
conventional movie device.
Just as in an absolutely archetypal example of
narrative fiction like one of the skazki analyzed by Vladimir
Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale, the entire action of the film results
from a single initial occurrence. It is Lu Mu Bai's decision to give up Green Dragon that
produces the state of instability that can only be resolved by the subsequent events, and the sword itself serves as both narrative device and as a symbolic
link which joins together the two stories, those of Lu Mu Mu and Shu Lien on the
one hand, and of Jen and her brigand lover, on the other.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes along when
the audience for martial arts movies has been growing for some time, and I
welcome its critical and box office success. But the first word that came to my mind after seeing
the movie was "innocuous"--which is not exactly a
compliment in my books. It's easy to see why the film has been such a hit. Ang
Lee's picture is very enjoyable to watch; it has a plot that any halfway
intelligent moviegoer can follow; it throws in ornamental snippets of Buddhist and Taoist
thought for amateurs of Asian philosophy; and last but not least, it boasts a whole
series of exciting, brilliantly staged action sequences that are relatively
devoid of gore.
As chance would have it, I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon a few days after I had caught up with Quills, a movie which has some basic
problems with scripting that certainly do not afflict this production. There is
no rupture of tone here, and the movie progresses almost placidly towards its
ultimate conclusion. Nevertheless, after I had viewed Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, Quills went up in my esteem. Better the quills of the prickly porcupine than
the comfortable fur of a crouching tiger that makes itself all too complacently agreeable.