Ang Lee and auteur wuxia: ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ at 25

For such a load-bearing scene, it moves with lightness and grace. A young woman arrives at an inn in a Chinese village. She orders food and wine but is interrupted by a group of men spoiling for a fight. She obliges, slashing and pirouetting until they’re all on the floor. This scene, along with everything else in Come Drink With Me, was a major influence on the modern wuxia film, swordplay epics derived from Chinese history and folklore. While wuxia stories had been adapted for the screen since the silent age, King Hu’s 1966 film was a sensation for producer Shaw Brothers, the midpoint in their pivot from female-leaning melodramas to male-centric martial arts films.

Cheng Pei-pei must have felt a sense of quiet pride seeing Zhang Ziyi lay waste to a tavern in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). She was the girl with the sword in Come Drink With Me, all of 19, trained as a ballerina. It was her ticket to stardom, even though the genre soon became the province of male action stars (even Chang Cheh’s Golden Swallow, a 1968 sequel to Come Drink With Me, reduced her prominence in favour of male leads Jimmy Wang Yu and Lo Lieh). But Ang Lee was a huge admirer of King Hu, and when he decided to make his first wuxia film, he borrowed freely from the master. If the tavern fight is an update of Come Drink With Me, the spectacular duel in the tall trees is inspired by a similarly buoyant sequence in A Touch of Zen (1971). He also asked Pei-pei to play the supporting role of villain Jade Fox.

Twenty-five years on, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is itself approaching classic status. It was nominated for 10 Oscars—including Best Picture and Director—and won four. It’s a remarkable synthesis of styles, a martial arts entertainer with the emotionalism of a Merchant-Ivory film, built around two romances, one halting and delicate, the other tempestuous and sweeping. Lee based the film on a 1942 novel by Wang Dulu set in the 19th century. When Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat), a master swordsman of the Wundang school, asks his partner Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) to give his prized 400-year-old sword to a benefactor of theirs in Beijing, it sets in motion a series of events. First, Shu Lien meets Jen Yu (Ziyi), a governor’s daughter who’s unenthused about her impending marriage into a wealthy family, but is fascinated by stories of martial artists like Li Mu Bai. That night, the sword is stolen by a masked thief, who fights off Shu Lien and vanishes over the rooftops.

It’s immediately clear that Jen is the thief. Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai are conflicted; they like the lonely, impetuous rich girl and admire her self-taught martial arts skills. Another, more pressing problem arises in the shape of their archenemy, Jade Fox—who, unbeknownst to them, is working as Jen’s governess. Jen, meanwhile, is pining for her secret love, Lo Xiao Hou (Chang Chen), a bandit whose gang attacked her caravan in the desert, but who then saved her life (this extended flashback, shot in the Mongolian desert, allows Lee to do his own version of a Western). In contrast to these volatile passions are Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai’s quietly repressed feelings for each other, only now coming to the surface.

Ang Lee’s career prior to 2000 was founded on relationship dramas like Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and Sense and Sensibility (1995). This certainly informed the wistful framing of Crouching Tiger, but it also meant that, apart from the Civil War skirmishes in Ride With the Devil (1999), he hadn’t done much action filmmaking. Paradoxically, this might have allowed Lee to envision his action free from the genre rules and expectations of both Hollywood and Hong Kong. A key hire was Yuen Woo-ping, a veteran who’d directed classics like Drunken Master (1978) and Iron Monkey (1993) and had designed the groundbreaking action in The Matrix the year before. Lee encouraged him to push his distinctive wire work combat to operatic limits. They created weightless, sinuous, emotionally charged fights that felt more akin to Pina Bausch than the martial arts cinema of that time.

Watching the film after almost a decade, I was struck by how focused it is (the runtime is a sharp two hours). Despite Peter Pau’s fastidious lensing and Yo-Yo Ma’s yearning cello on the soundtrack, there’s no fat on the bone. This makes it rather different from the auteur wuxia films its success enabled—Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006), Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet (2006), Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster (2013), Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin (2015)—where the arthouse touches are more pronounced.

Over the past year, I’ve been watching a lot of classic Shaw Brothers. I’ve grown extremely fond of their recurring themes, their rotating stable of heroes and villains and stuntmen, and their comforting adherence to formula. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is more sophisticated than those roughly sketched, quickly produced commercial films could ever be, but it has clear affection for them. Prior to the inn fight, Jen is sized up by curious local fighters. In a moment that’s pure retro martial arts goodness, they introduce themselves variously as Iron Eagle Sung, Flying Cougar Li Yun, Iron Arm Mi and Shining Phoenix Mountain Gou. “Who could remember such long-winded names?” Jen snarls. Yet, before she proceeds to knock everyone out, she gives herself a moniker: “Invincible Sword Goddess”. Some traditions are too good to break with.

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