Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee's, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is, in his own words, the fulfillment of a boyhood dream. He set out to make the best martial arts film that he could and, in many ways, he has succeeded. For my taste, I would cite several movies that I would consider superior as martial arts films, Enter the Dragon (Bruce Lee), any number of Jackie Chan films produced from the early eighties through mid-nineties (how about Police Story or Drunken Master II), or Once Upon a Time in China (Jet Li). However, this film holds up well and is significant in that it is being seen in wide distribution as a subtitled film with Mandarin dialog. With those martial arts films I note above, you may well not have the opportunity to see them in their original form.
Crouching Tiger's strengths are in its story which has several threads evoking secret martial traditions, hidden love, and forbidden passions, as well as lots of action. It stays true to the tradition of martial arts films in many ways and gives us an obvious villain lest we get too confused will all that is going on. I only wish they had not gone so over the top in imbuing the major characters with superhuman powers. Though this in itself does not stray far afield from some martial arts film traditions, I believe that it does distance us from the characters to a degree as we see them as very much not like us. I can accept this sort of thing in a film which is pure fantasy from the start but this film depicts itself as being very much grounded in reality much of the time with flights of fancy.
Having said that, I still feel that the film is well worth seeing and this really is a long overdue breakthrough for the genre itself. I doubt that American audiences are willing to accept a steady diet of challenging foreign films, subtitled no less, but the rare success that we see should be celebrated. One wonders if Bruce Lee had not died as he did, would this type of martial arts film experience not have come along many years ago?
1-21-2001