Year of the Dragon
Director Ang Lee is no stranger to the delicate task of aiming a movie at two very different audiences at once, half a world apart. "All the Chinese films I've made," he says, "from Pushing Hands to Eat, Drink, Man Woman, were mainstream summer blockbusters in Asia and art movies in the non-Asian territories. So I have always had to hit both standards." But Lee faced an added cross-cultural challenge with his latest picture, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a period swashbuckler in the ancient Chinese action genre known as wu xia, or "martial chivalry."
Although it's still mostly uncharted territory in the West, wu xia is China's central hero myth, like the samurai saga in Japan and the Western in the US. Wu xia stories have been a staple in Chinese popular fiction and on the Beijing Opera stage for centuries---and in Chinese-language cinema almost from the beginning. The earliest extant Hong Kong movie, circa 1928, is a wu xia serial, and as recently as the 1990s cinema and TV screens in the former colony were crowded with the paragons of justice sometimes referred to as "Chinese knights errant," righteous swordfighters who carry disciplined perfection in the martial arts into the realm of magic, focusing their chi so ferociously that they can leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Lee felt an obligation, he says, "to respect the promise that wu xia makes to the Asian audience, which is a fantasy of power, romance, and morality." Growing up in Taiwan in the 1960s, he had devoured wu xia novels and films. "When he spoke to me about Crouching Tiger," actress Michelle Yeoh recalls, "it was obvious that this was a dream he had been harboring since he was a kid. It would be a dream for any Asian filmmaker, because this material is so ingrained in our being."
But after leaving Taiwan in his 20s, to earn a Masters at the NYU Film School, Lee postponed his wu xia dreams, launching his career in the low-budget independent arena. "Once I had earned my right to do a bigger movie," he says, "I thought again of those period action stories." In the meantime, though, his creative ambitions had shifted: "I found I could no longer do a pure action movie, I had to bring the drama along with it. I cannot move too far away from the characters even when I stage an action scene."
Crouching Tiger broke box office records across Asia this summer, and it has been enthusiastically received at film festivals in the West, from Cannes to Toronto. So it seems that Lee and his long-time screenwriter, James Schamus, have successfully pulled off their delicate global balancing act. The movie certainly delivers what it promises in terms of action. Lee recruited Yuen Wo-ping, the 30-year veteran of the Hong Kong film industry who staged the gravity-defying "virtual kung fu" battles in The Matrix, to choreograph almost 30-minutes of high-flying dance-like action, sending Asian superstars Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh (along with charismatic newcomers Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen) almost literally into orbit, leaping across rooftops and balancing in the wispy upper branches of a forest of bamboo.
If the light-footed action is an eye-opening novelty for Westerners, it's the dramatic elements that seem to have startled Eastern viewers. "From an Asian point of view," Schamus suggests, "the emotional content is quite new for the genre. And the emphasis on female subjectivity and the concerns of the women characters is absolutely revolutionary." Lee and Schamus love to say that they sold Crouching Tiger by describing it as "Sense and Sensibility with martial arts," a reference to Lee's multi-Oscar™-nominated Jane Austen adaptation. And indeed, in addition to such standard generic plot elements as the theft of a magical weapon (the fabled Green Destiny Sword) and the pursuit of the notorious outlaw Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei), the film's plot is structured around the intertwined fates of two contrasting pairs of lovers.
The "sense" side of the equation is exemplified by former fighting companions Li Mu-bei (Chow) and Yu Shu-lien (Yeoh), who for years have repressed their feelings for each other while charging around the countryside sticking up for the underdog. For any fan of Westerns, the opening sequence of Crouching Tiger has a oddly familiar ring: Chow's Li Mu-bei has decided to give up the knight errant lifestyle, to hang up his sword, and Shu-lien has settled in town and opened a business, putting her martial skills to work as the proprietor of a bodyguard service---rather like the legendary gunslinger who opts out and becomes a sheriff. The movie's central suspense factor is whether the pressure of tumultuous events will persuade these two enormously sympathetic characters to reveal their true feelings. "This progression is very Chinese," Lee says. "The culture is very repressed, but there are a lot of hidden dragons in people, and crouching tigers, that from time to time explode."
The reckless young "sensibility" couple consists of Jen (Zhang), the arrogant daughter of a local governor, and Lo (Chang), the charismatic young leader of a band of desert brigands. Zhang Ziyi, a 19-year-old rising star from mainland China, aces the film's most duplicitous role, a seemingly fragile "Chinese princess" type who sneaks off at night to study a "dark" form of martial arts. Lo, the shaggy bandit is so impressed by Jen's fighting spirit that he can't help falling for her.
In both relationships, passion grows directly out of respect for the beloved's martial skills, which is tantamount to a quality of soul. The action sequences aren't just exhilarating interludes between the dramatic encounters but extensions of their concerns by other means. "Why is it that some people can fly," Yeoh says, "while others are always grounded and will never reach that level? Chow's character, Li Mu-bei, is the one who flies the easiest and the fastest, because he has freed himself from all worldly ties. Whereas my character, Yu Shu-lien, has to bounce off the walls or the rooftops, because she is more burdened by responsibilities, she is the more grounded person."
In this movie action and character are one, so the performers had to stay focused on their roles even when they were being swung around on cables 60 feet off the ground. Yeoh has been a Hong Kong action star for years, but even for her this project was a challenge. "Trying to remember all the movements," she says, "and also to play the drama, with your face expressing the emotions, your brain is literally split in two."
Chow Yun-fat, whose fame has been based upon playing dashing but very contemporary characters ---and who (Lee said) "had never held a sword before"--- had further to go to master wu xia-style martial arts. And he had just one month to make the transition, after the star originally cast in the role, Jet Li, suddenly decamped for Hollywood to make Romeo Must Die. Ang Lee himself, an adept of tai chi, the background subject of his 1992 debut feature Pushing Hands, became the actor's first-line martial arts instructor. "He taught me how to keep my balance," Chow says, "and how to make my body get into the character."
In their drive to integrate action and drama, Schamus and Lee made good use of the fact that woman warriors have always been central figures in wu xia. "The great thing about that tradition," Schamus says, "is that the woman was never The Chick or the Schoolmarm. She was a comrade in arms." Yeoh's career as a female action icon, in pictures like Supercop and The Magnificent Trio, is a contemporary offshoot of this tradition, which Yuen Wo-ping traces back to historical figures like the latter-day Disney heroine Mu Lan.
The fictional landscape of wu xia, too, the so-called "giang hu world," has at least nominal roots in historical reality. The term giang hu can be translated literally as "rivers and lakes;" metaphorically it refers to any wild or unsettled region. In medieval China, refugees from mainstream society, bandits, beggars, and con artists, lit out for the territories and prayed upon the straight world. As a glamorized fictional genre wu xia had its first flowering in the 12th century classic The Water Margin, in which a band of noble outlaws retreat to a swampy hide out and mount wrong-righting sorties against corrupt officials---a striking parallel with the Civil War-era "Bushwacker" vigilantes in Schamus and Lee's 1999 film Ride With the Devil.
Cult-like religious enthusiasms flourished in the giang hu, as well, magical practices, collectively known as shen gong, that supposedly conferred superhuman powers. This side of the popular oral tradition evolved into the lightening-like blasts of "palm power" and the weightless leaps of published wu xia fiction. The conventions became increasingly ingrown and fantastic as the genre exploded in popularity in the early decades of the past century, in the work of writers like Crouching Tiger source-novelist Wang Du-lu. In the more outlandish permutations, faultless chi masters battled dragons and rode to the rescue on the backs of giant birds. "The giang hu is a very special world," Lee declares, "but it is a created world. If you chose to work in this genre you have to show respect for its traditions."
But then, the very presence of Yuen Wo-ping in the crew, the man who helped launch Jackie Chan's career almost three decades ago, in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, is a sort of stamp of authenticity for any wu xia production, a gesture of respect toward the mainstream of the genre. In his own films as a director, like the two he made with Michelle Yeoh, the historical dramas Tai Chi Master and Wing Chun, Yuen says he took "a more realistic, down-to-earth approach to kung fu. But in Crouching Tiger I enjoyed the challenge of expressing the magical characteristics of wu xia and shen gong, very romantic, air borne, like a wind blowing."
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