Beautiful futility.

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2001)

*SOME MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW*
Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai represent the monk/warrior/meditative class seeking Nirvana. While Shu Lien still thinks there is virtue in such discipline, Mu Bai has become disillusioned. He has outdone his masters and achieved a meditative state of complete radiance, but for him it was unfulling and painful. Because of the impersonal nature of Nirvana, Shu Lien could never be there with him as an individual. Since they are deeply in love, yet chaste, Mu Bai has realized that no fulfillment exists for him apart from Shu Lien. That is, author Du Lu Wang has rejected the classical Chinese program of salvation through mental discipline in favor of the Western ideal of romantic love.
Lu Wang also rejects the Confucian ideal of submission to social order. Sha-Long is approvingly portrayed abandoning her husband from the marriage arranged for her by her aristorcratic parents. Again, the Western ideal of romantic love is given to us as superior to classical Chinese values. The willful Sha-Long is allowed to experience the freedom of unfettered romantic love in a desert sequence with the equally independent Sha-Hu. This sequence is essential to the storyline. It shows the kind of freedom which Lu Wang takes to be the `right kind' of freedom, as opposed to the mean, totally self-centered freedom exemplified by Jade Fox.
The problem, of course, is that romantic love does not provide the meaning of life any more than does meditation or scrupulous observation of social rules. We need only look at the Western experience, steeped as it is in willful romanticism, to notice the shortcomings of romantic love as a religion. In the closing scene, Sha-Hu is grieved. He knows that Sha-Long's leap from the bridge is impossible. It will not close the gap between them, nor bring them to a realm of romantic freedom. Sha-Long's leap is about herself, not them. It cannot be otherwise within a Western humanism centered on personal fulfillment. It's success depends on the unreality of those portions of the human heart that perpetually foil the human quest for meaning. There is no non-theistic answer to the question of the meaning of life.
That said, `Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' is a great film. The music is great. Yo Yo Ma is great. The cinematography is great. The sense of yearning and unfulfillment in the film's characters is portrayed with gracious understatement. Their passion is expressed with poetry in the dreamlike, yet personal, martial arts sequences. Only in the segments exhalting romantic love are sex scenes necessary or even relevant.

`Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' is a beautiful reductio-ad-absurdum of its own ambition.