Film Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2018)

Martial arts films are often enjoyable but they are seldom great art. Now, to everyone's surprise, Ang Lee, director of a number of excellent films, has made a martial arts film called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The result is a masterpiece.
The film belongs to a type of Chinese story called wuxia. These stories tell of nineteenth-century martial arts masters with unusual abilities. Wuxia films are popular in China, and they are now popular in the west too.
The story takes place in the early 1800s in China. A man and a woman, Li Mubai (played by Chow Yun-Fat) and Yu Xiulian (played by Michelle Yeoh), both masters of the martial arts, are in love with each other. But Xiulian had a fiancé who has died. Because this fiancé was a good friend of Mubai, Mubai feels that he cannot marry Xiulian. When someone steals Xiulian's sword, Mubai and Xiulian try to get it back. The action takes place on Peking rooftops, and in places as far away as the deserts of western China. As in the old wuxia stories, characters leap through the air every now and then, with beautiful, graceful movements, while audiences shout in surprise.
Unusually, it is the female characters that interest us most. Brave, good and strong, Xiulian is the character we care about most. Beautiful Zhang Ziyi plays the part of Yu Jiaolong, a young woman who is not as good as she seems. The fight scenes between Jiaolong and Xiulian are some of the most exciting moments in modern cinema. But one cannot forget the wonderful Chow Yun-Fat, who is as good with a sword as he is with a gun. His romantic scenes with Yu Xiulian are very moving, as their eyes show all the love that they must not express in words.
Films like this rarely reach the cinema. Go and see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It will make your heart leap with excitement at its beauty.