Peel the Onion | Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at 20: A luminous work of diasporic cinema

By J.B.Browne

Ang Lee's martial arts melodrama Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, remains the rarest of cinematic gems: an action movie with an extraordinary aesthetic beauty of lightness unlike anything before or since. Not only that, when it was released in December 2000, it became a global phenomenon earning more than $200 million worldwide, outperforming all other Chinese-language films in Asia. All this on a $15 million budget.

The film's spiritual power blunted critics at Cannes, who stood against the weight of rapturous applause. Word of mouth spread. Astonishing success followed, particularly in the United States, where it tore up theaters ($128 million) and smashed DVD sales and rentals ($112 million) (and yes, renting physical media seems weird, but it happened). Wherever it flew, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon achieved monumental success, evolving from art-house wannabe to multiplex disruptor. It's as if the film's Green Destiny sword was moving its real-life plot towards becoming the most commercially successful foreign-language film in U.S. history and the first Chinese-language film to find a mass western audience.

Accepted and critically lauded, the film made history at the Academy Awards as the first foreign-language film nominated in ten categories (until Roma in 2018) and the first Asian-language film nominated for best picture. Culturally, the film was a watershed moment for the unraveling of Chinese wuxia films that successfully tapped into the gainful American market, including Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

So what makes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so unique? The reasons are many and cumulative. Firstly, to put it in a more historical context, the film's English-speaking world triumph wasn't reciprocated in the east, where it more or less tanked. For Hong Kong and Chinese audiences, Crouching Tiger's stoic melodrama was, in the words of a Hong Kong film executive, "simply not enough action." Witnessing Cantonese-speaking heroes like Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh struggle with Mandarin prose and needing to read subtitles only exacerbated matters.

But having helmed lyrical takes on Jane Austen's Sense & Sensibility (1994) and Rick Moody's Ice Storm (1997), perhaps Lee's mastery of melodrama's gravity allowed his fusion of eastern philosophy, poetic dance, and wuxia tradition to work so well with western audiences. A drama peppered with martial arts elements instead of the inversion, something 90s Hollywood Asian cinema – think John Woo – never did.

The film's pulsating hidden heart is the twin tragi-love stories of its central characters. Lee knew how to focus in and reveal his characters' feelings intensely – that scene in Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson bawling uncontrollably comes to mind – and where most action-based films would set up to get going, Lee spends at least 15 minutes diligently introducing characters, establishing the unrequited love of Li Mu Bai (Chow) and Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh) and, of course, using the legend of Green Destiny as a plot device. The symbolic nature of Green Destiny, a 400-year-old sword belonging to Li Mu Bai, serves not just as a MacGuffin but, according to Lee, represents the yin essence of female energy.

But it's the mysterious Jen (Zhang Ziyi), her story, liberation, and the doomed passion she shares with desert bandit Lo (Chen Chang) who we follow. Despite her initial politeness and decorous visage, Jen, whose Chinese name Yu Jiao Long translates to "spoiled jade dragon," quickly reveals herself to a super brat with ocean deep anger issues. Jen steals the sword and does a runner, giving all an object to chase after, each a new destiny of their own.

Collaborating with Hong Kong martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, Lee constructs his action sequences with potent lyricism and balletic poise, a poetic style so out of place against the machine-leaning action clangers of today. Another uniqueness is how each action-sequence comes forth entwined with the characters' primal emotions. Their motives are not merely the duality of right and wrong. We know these characters, their wants, their sacrifices. Their actions are born from the poisonous constraints of society at large, and we empathize with them.

Jen's story is of a young woman in an imagined Qing dynasty China who longs for a life that can match her adventurous spirit. Her brattiness and rebellion are understood because she rejects the prison of an arranged aristocratic marriage. In doing so, she must steal the sword to empower herself to break free.

Twenty years on, the exhilarating grace of the bamboo forest scene is still extraordinary. Li Mu Bai's calm and restraint; Jen's anger and confusion. A scene between a master and an apprentice that could never be, their mutual admiration destined for destruction, swirling through the bamboo trees. Twenty years on, the tragic love story between Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien – "I would rather be a ghost, drifting by your side as a condemned soul, than enter heaven without you" – still packs a punch. Twenty years on, Tan Dun and Yo Yo Ma's original cello score still moans with the purest of heartaches — "The Eternal Vow" must be one of the most beautiful, mournful melodies ever recorded.

Twenty years on, nothing is more emotionally draining than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's confounding ending. Our female anti-hero stands atop Wudan Mountain. She's different. Lo begs her to come back to the desert with him. Their chapter is a mini-epic in itself, the two collapsing, exhausted in the dust of their courtship rituals. Jen's choices, however, are mired in pragmatism. The truth is, she'll never be able to return to the desert, no matter her love for Lo. To return would be to live a life of banditry. To roam free as a warrior would be a temporary fix, with her powerful family and the consequences of her past ready to pounce from the shadows. Then, as if making her mind up on the spot, she jumps and floats away like a feather. Self-annihilation or spiritual awakening? We're left to decide. Finally, she is free with her beliefs intact. The search for the understanding of the human condition transcends all epochs and cultures. Twenty years on, it still resonates and remains a movie unlike any other. Twenty years on, you can watch it again on Netflix.

As he would refer himself, J.B. Browne is a half "foreign devil" living with anxiety relieved by purchase. HK-born Writer/Musician/Tinkerer.