Movie Review:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Pablum?

By Michael Liu
2000

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is beautiful and wondrous filmmaking that will fail Sony Film's hopes to become the first subtitled megahit. Its flowing action and mystical story line will nevertheless tap into the martial arts crossover audience, the film crowd, and Asian youth and yuppies.

International Filmmaking

Ostensibly an Asian film, this film is actually a multinational corporate enterprise, which attempts to co-opt Hong Kong's distinctive cinematic genre. Tiger is financed by Sony Pictures based in Los Angles (though owned by Tokyo) and produced by a Taiwanese company with partners in Hong Kong, Paris, and New York. Thirteen Asian and US writers created the script. Ang Lee himself, formerly based in Taiwan and now in New York, is a globalized figure, who has made both "Eat, Drink, Man, Women" and "Sense and Sensibility." For several decades, Hollywood's formulaic pap has been displacing diverse local film industries and become one of the US's main commodity exports. It is an indicator of the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood that today it needs to enlist directors who developed in local industries even as it is undermining the latter.

The Film

Tiger is the story of a quest to recover a sword but is really about the struggle for the heart of young female warrior (Zhang Ziyi). Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), and his love, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), struggle against Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei) for the young woman's loyalty to differing philosophies of the Giang Hu warrior lifestyle.

So how does global cultural production distort Hong Kong kung-fu film sensibility? Some of it is for the better. There are much better production values. Higher budgets allow epic panoramas of western China's deserts, Beijing, and mist-enveloped mountains. The fighting scenes are simply amazing and distinctively surreal. There's an actual substantive story line.

However, the messages are distinctively Western – the conflict between personal freedom and social relationships and the social restraints on women. The film's co-producers called it, "Sense and Sensibility with martial arts." All the main characters struggle with the attractions of the unfettered warrior life and the attachments of family and love. Taking place in the 19th century, all main female characters are unusually independent. While admirable, this is an antedated, modern notion. And in contrast to the heart of the genre, kinetic martial arts, the story line is the slowest part of the picture. The cerebralism moreover will fail to attract the yahoo market, who populate Bruce Willis and Schwarzenegger films.

Passage to Pablum?

This is a transitional film as multinational corporate entities decipher how to translate local narratives to international audiences. In doing so, this film's weaknesses are the result of serving too many masters – the bottom line, a multinational audience, the movie making genre but also a specific, local cultural context. While Ang Lee is artful in balancing these concerns, this method of filmmaking will only grow and extend to other producers. We can only hope, against the Hollywood experience, that international capital will not gravitate to bottom line and seek the lowest common denominator. If so, they will not only displace local film industries but also destroy all that is unique and creative in diverse filmaking.