Surrender to the 'Tiger'

By STEVE PERSALL

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 1, 2001

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon makes you want to suspend reality and just enjoy the action, the drama and the romance.

Amazement is a commodity hard to find at the movies these days. Everything is pixel-perfect, smoothed and beveled into works so technically seamless and emotionally dreamless that modern cinema often appears too real to feel real.

Precision can be a sterile muse, shrinking fantasy down to fact, along with our chance to be astonished, which is what the movies are all about. What we need is a film that is unafraid to show the wires being yanked and compels us to overlook them.

Director Ang Lee has done it with his glorious martial arts myth, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

People fly in Lee's movie. Not always gracefully, due to some clumsy tugs of suspension wires hooked to actors and other transparent effects, but always with purpose thanks to a screenplay steeped in Asian lore and values, artfully polished into English subtitles by James Schamus. The evocative musical score, featuring Yo-Yo Ma's weeping then soaring cello, is a telltale element.

We learn so much about Lee's lovelorn warriors that when they leave the ground, our hearts go with them. That warm rush in the chest is a joy audiences haven't felt in a long, long time.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is based on a portion of a five-part pulp fiction series by Chinese author Wang Du Lu, an example of the Wuxia (woo-shah) genre. Wuxia is comparable to the American Western, but with swordplay subbing for six-guns. The barroom brawls are a heck of a lot more fun. Lee's film is easily the greatest martial arts flick ever, and much more.

Lee's nimble way with human nature gilded such fine English-language films as Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm, after his touching Taiwanese "father trilogy" earned U.S. attention. Similar emotions and images surface again in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as if Lee poured everything he's learned into this project. Every kick in the gut is accompanied by something for the heart.

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At the center of Lee's film are two of the steeliest female characters in years, the tiger and dragon of the title. Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) is a bodyguard for the province governor, serene in appearance until it's clobbering time. That's when she turns into an astounding hybrid of Peter Pan and Bruce Lee. Equally formidable and more impetuous is Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the governor's spoiled daughter.

Yu Shu harbors a quiet crush on Lu Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), a fellow warrior too devoted to duty to make the first move. Lu owns a super-sword called the Green Destiny that makes him invincible. The weapon is stolen by Jen as a prank at a bad time, when the mysterious Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei) is plotting against the governor.

Jen's rebellion against her protective father leads to romance with a vagabond thief named Lo (Chang Chen). He kidnaps Jen, and Lee sends his film into an entirely new direction, almost a movie within a movie. It's a sequence to make a viewer swoon, with dusty, sun-drenched vistas trampled by horsemen, or personal tenderness making every other recent movie romance seem phony.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon evolves like a lovingly drawn comic book, panel by panel, with economic timing. The only part approaching sluggishness is the introduction, although Lee's care with his characters pays off later. Twenty minutes into the film, a fight sequence erupts and the movie never looks back. Yu Shu and Jen flip, kick and, yes, fly across rooftops to thrilling effect. It's a show-stopper, customarily greeted with applause and a collective sigh of wonderment.

Will that be your favorite action sequence? Perhaps it will be Jen's one-woman wrecking crew performance clearing out a shady saloon. Or her jealous rematch with Yu Shu. It could be the climactic battle atop tall trees blowing in the breeze, with Lu and Jen tiptoeing and kicking on flimsy branches. Marvelous things look ordinary in Lee's film until viewers have no option except surrender.

That's the difference between Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the computer-driven statements of the art. Any filmmaker can assault our senses and pummel logic with the right budget. When you spot the frayed edges of Lee's special effects, it's easy to forgive because, yes, in the real world, people fighting on tree limbs would look awkward. Lee pulls fantasies back to us, making them seem both possible and downright amazing.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

• Grade: A
• Director: Ang Lee
• Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-Fat, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Cheng Pei-pei
• Screenplay: Wang Hui-Ling, James Schamus, Tsai Kuo Jung, based on a novel by Wang Du Lu
• Rating: PG-13; violence, sexual situations
• Running time: 120 min.

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