Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Review: Wuxia Takes Flight

Is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon worth watching?

Yes. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon remains one of the most beautiful martial-arts films ever made, and a love story of rare restraint. Ang Lee took the Chinese wuxia tradition of flying swordsmen and gave it the emotional patience of a period drama, so the fights feel like extensions of what the characters cannot say. The one reservation is a long flashback in the middle that slows the momentum, but the film recovers quickly and ends as strongly as it begins.

What is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon about?

In Qing-era China, the celebrated swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) decides to give up his legendary sword, the Green Destiny, and entrusts it to Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), a fellow warrior he has loved for years without ever acting on it. When the sword is stolen from the Beijing household where it is being kept, the theft draws them into the orbit of Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a young aristocrat facing an arranged marriage, and back towards an old enemy of Li Mu Bai’s who has never been brought to justice.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is adapted from a novel by Wang Dulu. It is in Mandarin, runs 120 minutes, and screened at Cannes in 2000 before becoming a worldwide crossover hit. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography, as well as the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language.

Fights that move like dance

The action, choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, is the film’s calling card, and it still looks extraordinary. A night chase across rooftops, a teahouse brawl in which one fighter takes on a room full of challengers, and a duel among the swaying tops of a bamboo forest are each staged with a different rhythm and a different mood. The wire work lets the fighters float, run up walls and skim across water, and Lee treats that weightlessness as poetry rather than spectacle.

What makes the sequences memorable is that each one reveals character. Yu Shu Lien fights with practical, grounded skill and whatever weapon is at hand; Jen fights with the arrogance and hunger of someone who has learned too much too quickly. Peter Pau’s photography and Tan Dun’s score, with its prominent solo cello, give even the fastest scenes a sense of calm.

Three performances built on restraint

Beneath the swordplay is a quieter story about duty and desire. Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh play two people who have let honour and loyalty keep them apart for years, and their scenes together, mostly conversations over tea or in courtyards, are full of things left unsaid. Yeoh is especially fine, carrying both the film’s most accomplished fighting and its deepest sadness.

Zhang Ziyi, in her international breakthrough, is the film’s volatile heart. Jen wants freedom from the life chosen for her, and Zhang plays her as proud, impulsive and hard to pin down, a heroine and a problem at once. The contrast between her restless youth and the older pair’s resignation is the film’s real subject.

Where the momentum dips

The film’s structure is its one soft spot. A long flashback set in the western desert, which fills in Jen’s past, arrives just as the main story is gathering speed. It is handsomely shot and adds useful context, but it plays almost like a separate film and interrupts the tension built in the opening hour. Some viewers also find the wire work a leap too far in the more fantastical moments, though that is part of the genre’s language.

Who should watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

It is an ideal entry point for anyone new to wuxia, and an essential film for action fans who value grace over brute force. Romantics will respond as strongly as martial-arts viewers, since the love stories carry as much weight as the fights. Watch it in the original Mandarin with subtitles if possible. Violence is frequent but stylised and rarely graphic, making it suitable for most older children and teenagers.

Two natural follow-ups:

• Hero, Zhang Yimou’s colour-drenched wuxia epic, which followed in this film’s wake and is even more formally daring.
• House of Flying Daggers, another lavish martial-arts romance, again starring Zhang Ziyi.

Admirers of Lee’s handling of suppressed feeling should also seek out his Brokeback Mountain, a very different film with the same ache at its centre.

The verdict

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a martial-arts masterpiece that also works as a sorrowful romance, with action sequences that still set the standard and performances that give them meaning. The mid-film detour costs it a little momentum, but more than two decades on it remains graceful, thrilling and quietly heartbreaking.

Rating: 4.5/5