Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

When Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out in the fall of 2000, it was a revelation for many North American moviegoers, who associated Asian martial arts movies with 1970s grindhouse fare and Jackie Chan action films. In adapting the, as yet untranslated to English, Chinese novel Wò hǔ cáng lóng, Lee would introduce international audiences to a different kind of Asian cinema, one rooted in traditional Chinese martial arts drama and infused throughout with significant thematic and philosophical allusions. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon also showcased the developments in Hong Kong action cinema since the 1970s, employing director and choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, who had recently worked on The Matrix after a long career in Hong Kong and with Jet Li, to oversee the film’s elegant and thrilling fight scenes. The film brought Asian martial arts films back to the limelight, and lay the groundwork for a renewed interest in martial arts cinema. It remains the highest grossing foriegn-language film in domestic North American box office history.

For myself at the time, the film was a revelation; but upon revisiting the film this month for the 20th anniversary of its release, I can confirm that it wasn’t just its novelty that caused the film to stand out. Having spent much of the last 20 years getting more fully acquainted with Asian, and Chinese-language cinema in particular, I can now more-fully appreciate what Lee was doing. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon remains a beautiful and technically accomplished film, from its cinematography to its fine performances to the still memorable and wondrous fight scenes. But what remains most compelling is the thoughtful meditation on the nature of individual power and its human drama: the unfulfilled romance of Chow Yun-fat’s Li Mu Bai and Michelle Yeoh’s Yu Shu Lien remains heartbreaking and emotionally wrenching in its nuance and loveliness.

Set during the 18th century Qing dynasty, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon actually adapts the fourth book in Wang Dulu’s series of early 20th-century novels. The film is rooted strongly in the tradition of wuxia, being the genre of “martial arts hero” in Chinese storytelling. These stories are usually about warriors who follow sacred codes of conduct, not unlike Western codes of chivalry, possessing exceptional fighting skills and engaging in quests and acts of heroism. In some ways, the heroes of the wuxia film are not entirely unlike the stoic outsider heroes of classic Hollywood westerns, and you can see similarities in some of the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa as well. Before Crouching Tiger returned the genre to prominence, it had seen its peak as a cinematic form in the late-60s and early-70s with the films of King Hu, such as Come Drink With Me and A Touch of Zen. 

Crouching Tiger refashions the wuxia for the global Chinese diaspora, with a cast and crew mixing Taiwanese, Hong Konger, Malaysian, and Mainlanders to bring it to life. The film stars Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-fat as a skilfull Wudang warrior, Li Mu Bai. At the start of the film, Mu Bai is visiting Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), for whom he has long harboured love, but never acted upon out of his duty. Mu Ba asks Shu Lien to take his sword—”Green Destiny”—to the wudang benefactor, Sir Te, in Peking. But shortly after, the sword is stolen by a thief, after a rooftop battle in which we first see the weightless “wire-fu” choreography by Yuen Woo-ping. Shu Lien traces the stolen sword to the household of Governor Yu (Sihung Lung). There she meets the governor’s daughter, Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi). Once Mu Bai joins them in Peking to investigate the stolen sword, he discovers that the murderer of his teacher, a woman named Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei) who attempted to learn wudang secrets, is posing as Jen’s governess. After an intense battle, it is discovered that Jen was the thief, to whom Jade Fox has been teaching everything she knew.

After Jen and Jade Fox escape, Jen is visited one night by a bandit named Lo (Chen Chang), and we learn that Jen is in an arranged marriage but in a flashback we learn that she loves Lo from a previous meeting in the desert, when his bandits attacked her family’s caravan and he stole her comb. Lo asks her to flee with him, but instead she bails on her wedding and strikes out on her own to Wudang Mountain armed with Green Destiny. Her journey and encounters and showdowns with Shu Lien and Mu Bai make up the bulk of the film’s second half, setting up a final showdown with Jade Fox and a tragic end.

Most of the popular memory of Crouching Tiger remains focused on its striking and beautiful fight scenes. Actors soar into the sky with the push of a toe, clashing in the air in carefully choreographed ballet-like action. Few films before or since manage to draw out the dance-like nature of wushu, or traditional Chinese martial art forms. It’s not an overstatement that Yuen Woo-ping’s work in this film and The Matrix films set a benchmark for this kind of martial arts action that stands to this day. The furious-yet-elegant lightsaber fights of the Star Wars Prequels and even the pulp-action of film series like The Transporter owe something to the work of Yuen.

But as I stated earlier, were it not a benchmark of action cinema, nor a discovery for North American audiences unfamiliar with Chinese cinema, Crouching Tiger still stands as a moving and beautiful story. It is a portrait of power given up by a man, as Li Mu Bai relinquishes his physical power, beginning with his sword and then his life for a greater good. But it’s also about the contested nature of knowledge in a society where codes of honour and filial piety determine action. Mu Bai’s and Shu Lien’s martial arts skills are what keep them apart, in that the xia code they follow causes them to forsake their romance in memory of Shu Lien’s dead fiancee who was Mu Bai’s friend. Jen seeks the forbidden knowledge of Wudang techniques in defiance of her family duty, learning from the traitorous Jade Fox and surpassing her, as she can read the wudang manual, while Jade Fox can only follow the diagrams. But even Jade Fox is a tragic instance of an illiterate woman being punished for her sexuality and class position by Mu Bai’s mentor.

In its thematic and production capacities, Crouching Tiger looks backward and forward, deeply ambivalent about the possibilities of each. One doesn’t get a simplistic framing of either traditional storytelling, nor modern fantasies of individual liberation in the film’s story. Neither does the film’s setting and return to an older kind of fairy tale structure detract from the way that Lee manages to draw on cinematic traditions from East and West, using solid Hollywood production values to tell a story rooted in China’s history, both of the 18th-century dynasty and mid-20th century Hong Kong and Taiwanese cinema.

Crouching Tiger remains a rich film, emotionally resonant and visually stunning. The renewed reminder is that the revelation of the film in 2000 was due as much to the deeply human story it told as to its novelty. A lesser film wouldn’t hold up in the history of cinema the same way. One will be hard pressed to find a film as heartbreakingly lovely and visually stunning as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in any era or place.

10 out of 10

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (China/Hong Kong/Taiwan/USA, 2000)

Directed by Ang Lee; screenplay by Wang Hui-ling and James Schamus and Kuo Jung Tsai, based on the book by Wang DuLu; starring Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chen Chang, Sihung Lung, Cheng Pei Pei.

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