Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
dir. Ang Lee
Sony Picture Classics

Epic in a way you’d be forgiven for thinking Hollywood has forgotten all about, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the moviest movie so far this year. The descriptors that critics toss out half-heartedly as praise for the summer’s many quarter-hearted movies — breathtaking, pulse-pounding, heart-stopping — apply literally here. Your breath will be taken away; your pulse will pound. Dick Cheney may want to think twice before buying his ticket.

Although the premise — fantasy martial arts from the director of Sense and Sensibility — might seem like a textbook example of a crossover that negates rather than doubles its appeal, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is exceptionally savvy in the way that it attracts those on both sides of every divide: men and women, arthouse and multiplex, Asian and American. The happy miracle is that the movie is never less than 100 percent Ang Lee.

Fleshed out from the novel by Wang Du Lu and set in ancient China, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tells the twin stories of Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), well-established in her career as the head of a security firm, and Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a governor’s daughter about to be married off for (familiar) political reasons. Consider these fundamental story arcs: Shu Lien has always loved Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), a warrior ready to give up warring, but has been unable even to acknowledge these reciprocated feelings because she had been engaged to one of Li’s slain brothers-in-arms, and to consummate the attraction would be to dishonor his memory. Li’s retired sword, the Green Destiny, is stolen by a thief believed to be working for Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), the female assassin who killed Li’s father. Jen has many secrets to keep from a family that would disregard her wishes, not the least of which is that her relationship with the bandit Lo (Chang Chen), who robbed the governor’s caravan, is far more than that of wrongdoer and wronged. It’s all pure Lee, cut from the same cloth as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm.

But it’s melded onto a pure strain of Chinese pulp fiction — the wuxia tradition, thematically more similar to the American Western than it is to kung fu, but where Westerns hinge on near-superhuman timing and resolve, wuxia takes it all the way to superhuman. Heroes fly, skip across rooftops, scale walls, run up tree trunks, get off six kicks to six brigands in one leap — feats all on display in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. What the Brothers Wachowski had to create a whole virtual-reality subtext to justify in The Matrix, Lee and company do without a second thought and, to be frank, to much greater ass-kicking effect. In 1980, movie-goers were told, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” Wait until you see what Lee’s gracious direction makes you believe here.

And that’s at the heart of this movie’s juggernaut appeal — just how willingly the willing suspension of disbelief comes. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon transports you like few movies do, but always while wearing its human heart on its sleeve. Peter Pau’s photography of China is as rapturous as anything shot in recent memory, the love scenes between Jen and Lo are so screen-meltingly sensual that they put any contemporary American competition to shame and the acting is impeccable across the board, particularly from Yeoh and Ziyi. Of course, the fighting, as choreographed by the legendary Yuen Wo-Ping (of Drunken Master, Iron Monkey, Fist of Legend and The Matrix), is jaw-dropping, among the best martial arts ever put to film. It helps that technology has allowed Lee to digitally erase the cables that enable all the wire-and-harness work — hardly anything in the movie, not even the final bamboo forest stunner, is digitally composited green-screen work — and, as a result, the illusion is completed in ways it never has been before.

Movies can only stand up under so much breathless critical praise before audiences feel compelled to bring out their most skeptical postures. But if any movie can endure it, it’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The film industry, whether studio or independent, American or European, offers up plenty to discourage even the most devoted movie fan; see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and fall in love with movies again.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)