"…a film from one of the world’s greatest directors: witty, exciting, uplifting and brilliantly crafted."

EVENING STANDARD.

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

Directed by Ang Lee

ABOUT THE FILM

Martial Arts super-star Chow Yun-Fat (The Replacemant Killers, Anna and the King) plays Li Mu Bai, a legendary warrior planning to retire from active life. Though his long-standing love for the woman warrior Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh: Tomorrow Never Dies) remains undeclared, he can ask her to deliver his precious sword, Green Destiny, to Sir Te in Beijing. The sword is stolen, and though suspicion falls on a terrifying female outlaw, Jade Fox, circumstances lead Yu Shu Lien to a much younger woman, aristocratic bride-to-be Jen (Zhang Ziyi: The Road Home). With the help of her governess and a stolen Wudan manual, Jen has secretly become trained in martial arts, and is now a highly skilled fighter. Her inspiration, the dashing young bandit Lo (Chang Chen: A Brighter Summer Day, 2046) once kidnapped her, but because they fell in love, he released her and vowed to become an honourable man.. Escaping from her arranged marriage and disguised as a man, Jen becomes a roving swordsman, but cannot hide herself from Yu Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai, reunited in their search for the thief and for the Jade Fox. Jen must fight warriors she admires and learn to recognise true evil before she can fully value her own skills and her real love.

The film’s title is a proverbial saying, indicating that the danger you can see and guard against may be less than the hidden possibilities you may not have admitted even to yourself.

NOTE

Described by script-writer James Schamus as "Sense and Sensibility with martial arts", Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon really does, against all the odds, articulate some potent thematic similarities between the writings of Jane Austen and the wuxia pian or martial arts chivalry film. These films, and the novels on which many of them are based, look back to a China still unopened to the West, where noble deeds of bravery and martial skill were undertaken against a background of hierarchical social order. Jane Austen’s heroines don’t, of course, tend to swing swords and battle bandits, but like the Wuxia characters, they must constantly negotiate with skill and compassion between the requirements of orthodox behaviour and the demands of their own emotions. There are poignant moments of unspoken feelings between the film’s mature but undeclared lovers, Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, which could be essential Austen translated into so exotic an idiom that the similarity at first seems unimaginable.

It’s appropriate to recall that Lee moved on to direct Sense and Sensibility on the advice of that film’s producer, Lindsay Doran, after she had seen one of his Chinese comedies of manners.

"She saw The Wedding Banquet," Lee recalls," and thought I’d be the proper person to interpret Jane Austen the way she understood it. I didn’t feel I did anything new there, I was just learning how to do a period piece in English. But after that I felt the urge to do something else- what else was fun out there? I wanted to go out for adventure and scare myself"

Following The Ice Storm and Ride With the Devil, both period pieces of different sorts, it’s difficult to imagine Lee doing much more scary than tackling the ultra-populist genre of martial arts films, and bringing his lush aesthetics to a type of movie he cheerfully describes as "cheesy".

Of course, though, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is far from the staccato chop-socky knock-about end of that market so admired by laddish audiences out for a quick fix of fast action and laughable sub-titles. It belongs rather to a romanticised vision of past where heroic physical bravery is part of a nostalgic taste for adventure well marinated in the mists of time. Except in specialist seasons, British audiences have been exposed to very little of this popular type. The fondly-remembered television import The Water Margin probably remains the most accessible example for most of us.

Lee, with scriptwriter James Schamus, discussed his attraction towards the Wuxia genre of adventure tales.

Lee: "The Wuxia is a warrior class during the time of Conficius, free-spirited martial arts figures. They are like Knights Errants, without a job, without loyalty to the government, rebellious, free in spirit, just in heart."

Schamus: "There are Wuxia novels, a genre based on these kinds of heroes. These heroes inhabit what’s called the Giang Hu world."

Lee: And that world is very popular in Chinese culture. It’s wishful thinking come

true, that’s Li Mu Bai’s character – righting wrongs, staying true to one’s words. The Wuxia novels have some premises, like surpassing your abilities through practising your martial art, and overcoming obstacles. You keep transcending yourself through the martial art, and fulfil the final achievement, which is transcendence – the internal strength, which in essence is searching for nothingness, the void, to find your strength. Because you’ve got all the tensions from external emotions, complex external relationships, all your strength goes in different directions and pulls you apart. If you can lose all the tension and direct all your energy to one channel, you create tremendous power and wisdom.

That is the style of martial art, Wudan style, versus Shaolin, which is more violent. The traditional division for martial arts is Wudan for inner strength and Shaolin for outer strength.

The essence of Chinese philosophy, in martial arts as in all types of philosophies, is to seek for harmony and try to reduce conflicts. Like everybody has a Buddha in himself, has unlimited power within that can be let loose. I find this very contradictory to western drama, which is what I do, where you tend to escalate the conflict. Chinese philosophy seeks the ease of your attention."

www.crouchingtiger.com

DIRECTOR’S INFORMATION

Ang Lee was born in Taiwan, and studied stage at the local Academy of Art before moving to the USA, where he studied theatre at the University of Illinois before moving on to take film production at New York University.

His first feature film, Pushing Hands, 1992, became the start of a trilogy of movies about contemporary Chinese life which the director groups together as his "Father Knows Best" sequence. The second of these, The Wedding Banquet, 1993, became the first Taiwanese film ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, for Best Foreign Language Film. The third in the sequence, Eat Drink Man Woman, was nominated in the same category.

In 1995 Lee helmed his first English-language feature, Sense and Sensibility. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning Best Screenplay for Emma Thompson’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel.

Lee also used literary adaptations for his next two films. 1997’s The Ice Storm, based on the novel by Rick Moody and starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, was a searing exploration of American suburbia during the morally combustible 1970s. 1999’s Ride with the Devil was based on Woe to Live On by Daniel Woodrell, is set during the American Civil War.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon marks Lee’s return to Chinese-language features.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

"An extraordinarily rich, romantic take on the wuxia, China’s heroic swordsman genre…It takes ten minutes of fairly dense exposition to get to the first, breathtaking fight-and-flight sequence, but from then on the movie never touches the ground…Inventively choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping – of ‘The Matrix’ fame – the film imbues every gesture with resonance and grace."

"Ang Lee’s first effort in the highly-specialised chop-socky genre looks as if he’s been there all his life. Could this possibly be the same man who made ‘Sense and Sensibility’? It seems unlikely. But then if you’re familiar with the pace, grace and elegance of the best of the genre, you may not be surprised. There’s an art to it as well as mere commercial flair….Set during the Ching Dynasty, and thus a period piece where costumes and décor matter, and even the scenery becomes important, the film tells its melodramatic story with all the usual clichés intact as if Ang was determined to do as well by this genre as he has by any other…he respects the source material while twisting it a little way here and there to allow us to see it in a fresh light."