An Epic With Style & Class

Rating: 9/10 (7 March 2001)

I was stunned to find that this movie was playing in a theater within walking distance of my house. This is not, of course, the sort of movie that generally gets wide release in America. It's easy to see after watching it, though, why this was an exception. The characters are well-developed, the actors who play them give good performances and the action sequences are interesting without being overly bloody. Jen is a girl after my own heart. She's too proud to know when she's lost and too headstrong to know when she's won, but she's *fierce* in a way that few young female characters are. The story of her determination to be free of the societal constraints of her position as an aristocrat, her tutoring by a shadowy warrior called Jade Fox and her love affair with an attractive thief named Lo is one of the two main stories. The other is about two old friends (Yun-Fat and Michelle) who are bound by honor to a dead comrade and therefore cannot love each other as they would like. The two stories are of course intertwined. The contrast between fiery Jen and Lo, willing to do practically anything to be together and the characters played by Yun-Fat and Michelle, who have only a bond to a friend long dead to keep them apart but allow it, is striking. Well done and well worth seeing, 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' just might help break down a couple more of those barriers holding back non-Western films in North America.