An accomplished film by Ang Lee

Rating: Null/10 (17 December 2000)

The story begins when a renowned swordsman named Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat) travels to the palace of a peaceful king named Sir Te, whose security is maintained by his friend Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). Mu Bai has just returned from a meditative excursion to a mountain that has left him spiritually unsound. Although his non-enlightenment was something that has left him in a state of unease, and at odds with the promise made to him by his dead master, Mu Bai still decides to renounce his famed sword, the Green Destiny, to the protective hands of Sir Te.
Ang Lee quickly establishes the social order of his characters when Shu Lien meets Sir Te's daughter Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a seemingly quiet girl whose secretly rebellious nature lies at the center of the film. A mysterious figure steals the Green Destiny and Mu Bai believes that the perpetrator is Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), a female martial arts legend who was responsible for the death of his mater. The three women at the heart of Crouching Tiger all represent the vastly different paths the female can choose to follow in a world dominated by the fighting male. It's a world that these three women have longed for but one so inherently uninviting to the woman that it is very easy for these women to choose the path towards evil. Jen, arguably the film's center, is caught in the middle; needing to decide whether to follow the teachings of Jade Fox or bow before the open arms of Mu Bai and Shu Lien.
The Wuxia Pien, a category of the kung fu drama relying heavily on the presence of warriors with magical warriors, is something inherently melodramatic and ridden with archetypes and cliches. This is in full effect in Crouching Tiger, but Lee manages to stage the proceedings with such a gorgeous glow and pristine understanding of his characters pathos that their journeys toward self-actualization is something that is always within the realm of complete believability.
Take one scene in the desert, where Jen becomes romantically linked with the bandit Lo (Chen Chang). The flashback to the much younger Jen shows her pursuing Lo across the desert in an attempt to retrieve a comb. Her pursuit of the girly item (albeit a family heirloom) is at first troubling, considering how fiercely independent she is, but her journey becomes rooted in a mutual exchange of power between herself and Lo. Her love for Lo, erotically charged in ways that makes Minghella's The English Patient look like the cheap burlesque story that it is, becomes the source of primal strength that will drive Jen throughout the duration of her life.
Lee and Peter Pau, his cinematographer, stage their characters within their settings in such a way that their relationship to their environment becomes something from which the characters draw spiritual strength. Mu Bai and Jen's dance atop a forest's treetops, the film's visual centerpiece, could have been saddled with spectacle but Lee turns the choreographed bout into something much more urgent. It is a battle between a man completely at ease with his relationship to nature and a woman so driven to prove a point that she has failed to notice that her impulsiveness has not gained her the spiritual peace of mind that will make her a true master.
Many have singled out Michelle Yeoh as the centerpiece of the film. One would be hard-pressed to find an actress who can express so much with so little and even though Yeoh's tragic beauty seems to hint at a legacy of pain, Lee fails in truly center Yeoh's Shu Lien within the confines of a solid and three-dimensional narrative. It's always clear that she and Mu Bai gave up on love because of the respect she still harbors for her dead lover, but there is nothing to their relationship aside from a couple of longing stares. It's subtle, but too subdued to register as much of a passionately resonating impulse as the relationship between Jen and Lo.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon belongs entirely to Zhang Ziyi, a fierce creature that teeter-totters between the inviting force of good and evil. Her journey, which ends in a glorious display of spiritual self-sacrifice, is engaging because we never know at any given point in the film whether she will fall into the welcoming arms of Mu Bai or Jade Fox. She is to Crouching Tiger what Luke Skywalker was to Star Wars, and I'm sure many will find the mythos that is so deeply-rooted in the Lee film to be reminiscent of the world that Lucas created in his 1977 space saga.
The world of Crouching Tiger could very well be the world of China itself. It is a world of magic and intrigue, where men and women are bound by the ethos of honor and dignity. It is a land rich with the intricate history of all it's people, slowly enveloping its arms around the females of the land, long relegated to the role of servant and obedient wife. Many will no doubt flippantly brush Lee's film away as a mere post-feminist diatribe, catering to the Camille Paglias of the world who long for female empowerment in otherwise testosterone-laden tales. But let's not trivialize a film that is obviously grasping for something entirely more complex.
Crouching Tiger isn't a film about women beating each other up for two hours. Granted, there is plenty of woman-to-woman battle sequences, and they are all ferociously fierce of behold, but the film's quieter moments suggest that this is not merely a film about female empowerment but female solidarity. One of the film's least energized scenes allows us to feel sympathy for the otherwise loathsome Jade Fox because we understand that her chosen path was one that was necessary for her to take. It was a decision that was in direct opposition to the status quo but it was her only apparent means for self-expression. Her intended revenge on one of the main characters is nothing more than a misguided, although understandable, attack on a fellow woman who used thievery to impose above her the proverbial glass ceiling that is usually constructed by the male.