Quality, tasteful, restrained film-making.

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2001)

'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' certainly exudes 'quality' beauty, from the miraculous recreation (or has the country simply not changed?) of turn of the century China, and the relentlessly symmetrical compositions, the immovable grid against which the characters struggle to express their humanity, to the expansive Tan Dun score, which matches Hollywood in scope, but manages to avoid sentimentality and overly crass commericalism, probably through the melancholy Yo-Yo Ma cello solos which give this film its distinctively downbeat atmosphere, unusual for any kind of action movie, never mind the usually exuberant martial arts genre.
This is in keeping with what we expect from Ang Lee - these aren't carefree heroes he gives us, but weary warriors, disenchanted with the false mythology that has grown around their caste, paralysed by emotional repression imposed by stern codes that seem increasingly irrelevant or inadequate. In this, it is like 'Gladiator', and it shares with that 'film' an overall sombre stateliness with frenetic spurts of action.
Of course, this is only a superficial comparison - whereas 'Gladiator' was a glorified computer game, 'Crouching' reeks with authenticity, a sympathy with and understanding of Chinese culture (society, rites, philosophies etc.), of human nature, of the influence of culture on human nature, the impact of tradition; everything 'Gladiator' revealed about Roman society and culture could have been gleaned from a Steve Reeves outtake.
This is what gives the film, which has a surprisingly simple plot, considering the genre, its satisfying depth and texture - one never feels that it is simply generic. But this is also the film's flaw (besides the fact that I'm not really into solemn stateliness), one that it shares with Lee's last film, 'Ride With the Devil', which was another attempt to humanise, de-cliche an action genre, the Western, and which succeeded so well that one sometimes wondered where the entertainment had gone to.
Don't get me wrong, 'Crouching' is very entertaining. The action scenes are simply magical. One of the cliches about a certain kind of action cinema is that it is balletic. For instance, Sam Peckinpah. But in Peckinpah's films, the action itself is not balletic, just men standing around shooting each other; it is the rhythm created by montage and composition that creates this feeling of dance.
'Crouching' is truly balletic, or dance-like; the exhilirating physical verve within a set of precise, expressive movements gives the film the same sense of controlled improvisation as a Gene Kelly routine. These aren't just fights, but rigorously timed dances, each contrary move complementing or developing the previous, so that the potential chaos of the content - fighting, flying, fleeing etc. - is beautifully harmonised by the form, as you would expect from Lee.
The camera is as liberated and controlled as the warriors; in one astonishing scene it follows a falling victim of Jen Yu down the top of a restaurant to the ground floor and continues to record the action with fleet energy, giving it an almost supernatural, non-physical power.
As Li Mu Bai says, there is no desire without restraint. But sometimes there's a little too much restraint. Sometimes you just want to escape the suffocating honorability of Li and Yu, and revel in the tyro delirium of Jen, whose undisciplined energy is a constant, sensual joy, one sequence as beserk as a brawl in a Western. You know with Lee you will never trespass the bounds of taste, never reach the obscure, psychedelic audacity of 'A Touch of Zen', or the sheer silliness of 'The Dead and the Deadly', where the hero is turned into a slug.
Sometimes, such as the astonishing airborne fight in the bamboo trees, or the 'Fantomas'-like plot involving a masked stranger and a villainess called Jade Fox (the film is fundamentally conservative, and yet sympathetic to its lesbian-feminist transgressor), or the 'Winchester 73'-like abstracting of the plot by having a weapon as the film's true hero, or the remarkable extended flashback sequence where Jen meets the barbarian Lo, you wish that Lee might push it a little further, might leave tastefulness behind just for a moment and do something daft. But he always pulls back, as his story and characters demand. For better and worse, this is exactly the kind of martial arts movie you would expect the director of 'Sense and Sensibility' to make.