‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ Continues to Be a Masterpiece

When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon became the Oscars’ first Asian Best Picture nominee at the 2001 ceremony, it was only the seventh non-English film with this distinction in the Academy’s then 73-year history. Now back in U.S. theaters thanks to a re-release from Sony Pictures Classics, Ang Lee’s wuxia epic is set to enrapture audiences once more, and the passage of time has hardly dulled its shine. It remains just as lush, visceral, poetic, and enthralling as when it first arrived on American screens in December 2000 (after a July release in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong). The period-action-romance introduced far-flung corners of the moviegoing world to both a litany of Asian talent, as well as what one academic paper describes as “a China of the imagination.” Its tale—of warriors and assassins fighting to claim the legendary sword known as Green Destiny—unfolds against the backdrop of the Qing dynasty, which lasted from the mid-17th to early 20th centuries. However the movie doesn’t specify exactly when, during this nearly 300 year period, its events are actually set, resulting in a nebulous, picturesque cultural fantasy aimed equally at western and eastern viewers.

In the years since Crouching Tiger, which was Lee’s seventh feature film, he has become a prolific name in Hollywood, between helming the superhero movie Hulk, and his two subsequent Oscar wins for Best Director (for Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi). But the classic martial arts epic—co-produced by companies in the U.S., China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—was hardly his first foray into the west. In fact, Lee’s adaptation of the eponymous novel (released serially by author Wang Dulu in the early 1940s) was his return to his Taiwanese roots after a trio of Hollywood films. His first among these was the Jane Austen adaptation Sense and Sensibility, which he made in 1995, but the three Mandarin comedy-dramas he made prior to it were also, notably, U.S.-Taiwan co-productions. As an international student at the University of Illinois and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Lee’s career and artistic lens have always traversed two different worlds, making him particularly well-suited to the task of creating Chinese fantasy with widespread cultural appeal.

To most western viewers at the time, the wuxia genre was little more than an exotic cable oddity with idiosyncratic English dubbing. Its tropes were broadly familiar, if only as stereotypes—traveling warriors with tragic pasts, and lightning-quick, highly-choreographed stunt work—but by the turn of the century, Hollywood itself had begun to be influenced by Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. Between the success of Disney’s Mulan in 1998—which familiarized viewers to images of warriors in pre-modern China—and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in 1999, with its Hong Kong-inspired wire-work combat, there existed a few mainstream touchstones for the kind of storytelling Crouching Tiger had to offer. It may have been newer (and arguably more authentic), but its visual and narrative language weren’t entirely exotic and unfamiliar.

However, where the likes of Mulan and The Matrix translated and transformed cinematic ideas for western audiences—between the Americanization of Chinese folklore as a Disney musical, and explaining superhuman stunts as a product of science fiction—Crouching Tiger’s approach to the martial arts genre was more straightforward in its acceptance of existing tropes. For instance, its characters, trained in the art of Wudang (known to most westerners as Wu-Tang), soar through the air and skip across ponds and rooftops as a matter of convention, without apology or explanation. 

Lee’s westernization of the genre is far more subtle. Rather than diluting what classic martial arts cinema has to offer, in terms of design or spectacle, he instead imbues it with trenchant aesthetic melodrama, which makes for an especially intriguing clash with his characters’ withheld emotions. Warriors Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) may only express their mutual affection through still and silent glances, but Lee contrasts the subtlety of their interpersonal drama with the wildly operatic melodies of Tan Dun’s musical score, and filmmaking which forces even their most buried longing to the surface, whether through gentle lighting and piercing close-ups, or a focus on the beauty of the natural landscape.

The plot may revolve around the ownership of Green Destiny—which Li Mu Bai initially gives up as a mark of retirement—but the story is one of shifting allegiances and difficult decisions, which add shades of moral grey to each fight scene. It often plays out like a battle for the soul of a young thief and assassin, Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), whose own martial arts mentor Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei) killed Li Mu Bai’s master long ago, thrusting the main characters into a feud that long predates them. The questions of what their duty entails, and what they owe both older generations and the dead, is mirrored deftly by the question of gender roles, and the way they’re frequently broken by the likes of Jen Yu, a governor’s daughter, who’s set to be married, but who’s future is complicated by her passionate affair with the bandit Dark Cloud (Chang Chen).

The stunt choreography remains especially remarkable; Lee’s lengthy wide shots when capturing hand-to-hand combat, interspersed with scattered slow-motion shots to emphasize impact, evoke prominent ‘70s Hong Kong directors like Lau Kar-leung and Yuen Woo-ping, perhaps best known for their work with Jackie Chan (Yeun would even go on to direct the movie’s 2016 English-language sequel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny). However, the action-packed conflict over the sword is a mere microcosm of a much larger conflict of identity, often caused by the invisible societal constraints around the characters. Each performance is, therefore, injected with a melancholy undercurrent, which in turn imbues each fight scene with both grace and purpose. The memorable battle between Jen Yu and Yu Shu Lien in the weapons room (almost all of it performed by Zhang and Yeoh themselves) is both lightning-quick and emotionally impactful, but its escalations are rooted in the sisterly dynamic between the characters, one beset by a betrayal which they may or may not be able to set right. 

This is soon followed by yet another iconic fight scene, involving Zhang and Chow’s characters sparring in mid-air amidst swaying bamboo trees, an environment that both adds scale to their superhuman flight and paints it with serenity, as if it were an extension of Li Mu Bai’s near-unshakable poise. The wirework, which allows the characters to traipse through the air, never looks realistic, but it’s never meant to. There’s no real-world equivalent in which to root the motion of human beings ascending this way, on platforms made from nothing. This sort of movement exists only in dreams of flying, a sensation Lee re-creates in soulful fashion. 

These warriors are people, made from flesh and blood. But their story transcends time and culture because it’s one of spirits—floating, flying, in search of purpose and grounding, in a world that prevents them from loving fully, and living freely.