Ang Lee Grafts Martial-Arts Romance with a Parable of Feminism

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Directed by Ang Lee If you've seen a lot of martial arts movies?including the kung-fu inflected The Matrix, which had the same choreographer, Yuen Woo Ping?you've seen variations on this brand of Chinese movie combat. Known as Wuxia, it dates back to the 60s. You probably know it's done with wires, and that it's not supposed to be taken literally, any more than the superhuman punch-outs in Superman II are supposed to be taken literally. But they're not supposed to be taken lightly, either. Lee, a Taiwanese-born American filmmaker who is establishing himself as one our most ambitious and varied directors, doesn't merely appropriate wire combat for its own hip sake. He re-thinks it, pushing it to the next level, so that it becomes not a wild and flamboyant method of movie combat, but a mode of travel, perhaps a state of being.

The evolutionary attitude is worth noting. Previous Lee films, however diverse in subject matter, have been firmly rooted in reality, from The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility through The Ice Storm. This latest film liberates Lee from the constraints of realism just as the high-flying combat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon frees the participants from the laws of gravity. Like Peter Pan, Lee suddenly learned to fly, and he realizes that, no matter how fantastic it may seem, it's just another way to get from Point a to Point b.

The rather slender narrative could be summarized as "four characters in search of a magic sword." The great Chinese movie star Michelle Yeoh?best known to western audiences for the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies?stars as Shu Lien, a feared female warrior who works for the governor of a large eastern province. At the start of the story, Lien's old friend, the legendary sworsdman Li Mu Bai, arrives to announce that he is giving up his life of violence and passing along his famous sword, The Green Destiny, to his elder, Sir Te (Lung Sihung). But shortly after the sword is delivered, it's stolen by a mysterious black-clad figure who sneaks into the governor's headquarters late at night and makes her escape across the rooftops, scampering up and down the slanted tiles like a cat wearing a jet pack. Bai and Lien have to get the sword back, but how?and from whom?

They suspect the culprit might have been the villainous Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei), who killed Bai's mentor. But Lien also wonders if the governor's daughter, Jen (Zhang Zi Yi), was involved; she's a trained fighter who spent many years out in the desert, and now she's fated to marry a man she doesn't love. (I'm not spoiling anything here, incidentally. The director makes it obvious that Jen is the culprit via close-ups of the masked sword-thief's eyes in the first action sequence and slyly traded looks between Jen and Lien later on. The suspense comes from seeing Lien figure it out, then draw Jen into fessing up.) Meanwhile, the dreaded Jade Fox is back in action, wreaking havoc on the forces of good; though she's not an especially graceful fighter, she's ferocious and versatile, employing a wide variety of weapons, including a blowgun that fires clouds of tiny poisoned darts.

As if that weren't enough incident, the film also must attend to the not-so-small matter of Bai and Lien's relationship. They've loved one another from afar for many years, but never did anything about it. It would be easy to read this soulful-but-not-physical relationship as a reference to an older variety of romantic fiction exemplified Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. In some ways, Crouching Tiger does seem like spiritual kin to Lee's Sense and Sensibility. Like Sense, Crouching Tiger is a class conflict movie, about the romantically charged interaction of hyperintelligent, hyper-repressed characters, one bunch drawn from the upper class, the other from the equivalent of the middle class. (Bai and Jade Fox represent the middle class that willingly represses its own desires to better serve the powerful.) And like Lee's other films, Crouching Tiger is also a culture conflict movie, about a newer set of values challenging and ultimately supplanting an older set of values. In this instance, the fresh idea is female autonomy.

If you want to lift the narrative out of its historical-fantastic context and apply it to the contemporary West?which, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, is not such a bad idea?then Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can be read as a parable about how feminism affected (and is still affecting) the relationships between men and women throughout the world during this century. Consider Lien's predicament. On first glance, she appears to be the incarnation of that notion. She is intelligent and beautiful, and so physically capable that no man treats her with anything but gender-neutral respect; like Ripley in the Alien movies, she seems to take charge of a room just by entering it. But she has allowed patriarchal interests to yoke her power; in more than one way, this woman is working for The Man, just as her beloved Bai, who claims the amusingly phallic title "master swordsman," is also working for The Man. Just as feminism questioned the established order and encouraged men to do the same?making everyone ask, "Who are we working for, what are we working for, and is any of it right?"?the stirrings of autonomy felt by Jen, Jade Fox and Lien question the established order of this movie's historically rooted but fantastically realized China.

This is an important point?one that appears to have been ignored by the legions of Hong Kong chopsocky buffs who are dismissing Crouching Tiger as too art-filmish, too commercial and neither Chinese enough nor kick-ass enough to pass muster: This is not a Chinese movie. Though it was shot in China and acted in Chinese, not English, it was never supposed to be a Chinese movie, and it isn't being sold as a Chinese movie. Rather, it's a film that borrows on Chinese filmmaking traditions?particularly the wire-stunt craziness of Golden Harvest Studios in the 80s and 90s?but is psychically rooted in the West.

Which is a valid approach, and should be treated as such. Crouching Tiger is a kung fu movie in the same way that Sergio Leone's berserk, operatic Italian oaters were westerns; Lee, like Leone, is caught between two cultures and two national filmmaking mentalities; the tension between the seemingly incompatible cinematic styles is what makes the film special, perhaps unique. Musically, Jimi Hendrix and Elvis were in similar pickles. Jimi was a black man playing white music based on black music; Elvis was a white man performing black music with white rockabilly inflections; each was accused of running from his own culture and exploiting another. But it was precisely these sorts of complications that made the work fascinating; Jimi and Elvis were forward-thinking showmen who embraced the contradictions and messiness that accompany cultural cross-pollination. They mixed things up to advance their own personal agendas and explore their own idiosyncratic obsessions.

Lee, a pop craftsman with a pure heart, works in the Elvis-Jimi tradition. His obsessions are class, ethnic loyalty and the status of women in a still-male-dominated society. That the central plotline of Crouching Tiger revolves around the theft of an all-important mystic sword is no accident; in fact, as metaphor, it's probably too on-the-nose. But it resonates; Jen, the privileged young girl educated in the western part of China (in the West?get it?), comes home with a head full of ideas about self-determination and a lot of martial arts skill, which she learned from Jade Fox. She is tired of being oppressed by the sword, so she steals it, then slaughters armies of men who try to take it back from her. (Those who live by the phallus...)

Jen's ally, Jade Fox, has issues of her own. She showed Jen how to fight, based on a martial arts book she studied, but because Jade Fox could only interpret the pictures, not read the words, she could only learn so much, and then deeply resents the fact that her learning has stalled and nobody will help her advance to the next level. As a Mongolian from the lower rungs of China's social ladder, Jade Fox's predicament is somewhat like that of black women who gravitated toward the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s; privileged girls from the dominant social class (white girls from good homes) looked to women of color for inspiration and street smarts, but once the fight for equality had been more or less won, they didn't do enough to lift their allies to the next social level.

And what of Lien? She's a self-reliant woman, a powerful woman, yet she denies herself romantic happiness and chooses to work for the patriarchy rather than for herself. She's not unlike Jeffrey Wright's character in Ride with the Devil, a black man who fights for the Confederacy to discharge a personal obligation to a white family that helped him. In each film, personal allegiances trump deeper ties, and characters who could make powerful and perhaps influential symbolic statements choose, for personal reasons, not to.

This is just one possible reading of a very rich film?a film that belongs not to China or to America, but to the world. You don't think about feminism or class or the West-East stylistic conundrums while you're watching it. You're too enthralled by the strangely dreamlike action, the one-thing-after-another plotting, and the many surreal and shockingly right images?a fleeing combatant walking on water, two fighters fighting on a slender tree branch like tightrope walkers, the whistle of wind through boughs at dawn. This is a one-of-a-kind film, guaranteed to mesmerize even those who don't warm to it; love it or hate it, you haven't seen anything quite like it.