Woman Warriors

The people who run Sony Pictures Classics may be crazily over-optimistic in their Best Picture Oscar hopes for Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it is a terrific movie. Certainly, critics love it; witness the outpouring of acclaim that greeted it at Cannes and Toronto in the last six months. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether the vast American ticket-buying public will flock to a Hong Kong martial arts film, especially one in Chinese with subtitles. Worse still, Lee's arthouse coterie -- who have loved such small classics of his as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense & Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Ride with the Devil -- may be turned off as well by this very self-conscious exercise in a very specific set of genre conventions about which most art film lovers haven't a clue.

The film, which is based on a novel published about a hundred years ago, is set in the early 19th century, when the Wuxia knight errants (similar to Japanese Samurai, who first arose in China during the era of Confucius) ruled the land. The hero, Li Mu Bai, is played by Chow Yun Fat, last seen on these shores as the monarch in Jodie Foster's version of Anna and the King. His counterpart, and star-crossed love interest, is Yu Shu Lien, radiantly incarnated by Malaysian-born Hong Kong actress Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies). In his desire to reconsider his violent life as a martial artist, Li turns his trusty sword, Green Destiny, over to Li for safekeeping. From this point on, the plot becomes frightfully -- and deliciously -- complicated (it runs to three single-spaced pages in the press kit), principally involving Li and Yu and another set of lovers, who are younger: Jen (played by Zhang Zi-Yi, a recent discovery of Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the legendary Chinese actress Gong Li) and Lo (Chang Chen). The remainder of the film is filled with hidden and mistaken identities, crafty female villains who use poison on their enemies, interrupted marriages, and unrequited love.

And lots and lots of superbly choreographed fighting, most of it performed by the film's female figures, which actually occupies more than 30 minutes of its running time. Here, Crouching Tiger has been heavily influenced by The Matrix, sharing as it does the talents of Yuen Wo-Ping, a legendary Hong Kong master who also staged the fights in the American film. The moments in Crouching Tiger in which the fighters scale walls and do battle in treetops take your breath away; at Cannes, the conclusion of the first fight scene drew a burst of spontaneous applause from critics at the press screening.

On the one hand, Lee reverently follows the conventions of the genre that he says occupied a great deal of his moviegoing life in '50s and '60s Taiwan, where he grew up. And the genre has never been done better. On the other hand, he has suffused his film with the deeply philosophical spirit of the Tao and welcome romantic elements that take it in entirely new directions, or at least develop more fully what was only hinted at before. Most surprisingly, the film relies for most of its action on its female warriors, a decision which adds a new and wonderfully bracing level of emotional involvement to the proceedings which might otherwise have become tedious exercises in martial skill.

In fact, after a while, the cumulative weight of the fight scenes does begin to wear a bit, and the film would play better with ten or fifteen minutes trimmed. But the landscapes are so gorgeous, the philosophy so richly appealing, the narrative so epically sweeping, and the characters so intense, that you end up not minding a bit.