![]() With its pointed intensity and the compelling, single drumbeat on the soundtrack, it's an action sequence to treble the heart rate and cause the skin to prickle with goosepimples.Īng Lee's achievement is to reconnect the genre with its innate, latent sense of decorum and romance, qualities which have been ignored, or treated ironically or unintelligently. If you're too cool to be excited by it, then you're too cool. Only then does Lee unleash Yu Shu Lien's thrilling rooftop chase with the masked intruder: a fight of incredible strangeness, stark moonlit mystery - and delirious excitement. The opening punch-up is not vouchsafed to us straight after the credits, or even during the credits, in the way we have come to expect from any action picture, but after 10 self-effacing minutes of exposition. It grafts onto it a kind of fabular quality, which confers such distinction on the film, but leaves intact the thrills of the fight scenes themselves. In one scene, the brutal clash of fists and weaponry disturbs the birds in the trees and Lee interrupts our view of the fight briefly, in favour of an epiphanic vision of the birds ascending into the sky: a pleasing moment of inspiration which anticipates the climactic fight between Jen and Li Mu Bai as they float through the treetops themselves: in its exuberance and charm, it has to be one of the most beautiful moments in modern cinema.Ĭrouching Tiger adopts the convention of the wu xia martial arts stories: in formal combat, the rules of gravity are suspended, and with them the rules of narrative and ordinary human possibility - bringing into the action genre a delirious new sort of magic realism. ![]() There is real poetry and artistry in the way the visual images are assembled which lifts this film miles above the crudeness of berk flicks like Romeo Must Die. ![]() Until seeing this film, I had long thought that some kind of moratorium ought to be declared on the indiscriminate use of the word "balletic" to describe fight scenes - a naive cliche generally used by those who have never seen a real fight, or indeed a ballet, in their lives.īut no other word will do for the sublime perfection of these action sequences which Ang Lee's touch - and that of choreographer Yuen Wo Ping of Matrix fame, and cinematographer Peter Pau - have realised with such extraordinary flair. The delicate sadness and internalising of their love unfolds in parallel with the blazing passion of another couple: Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a gorgeous young aristocrat, has formed a secret liaison with outlaw Lo (Chang Chen), but she yearns for the life of the warrior and steals the Green Destiny, Li Mu Bai's precious sword, richly and exquisitely carved and inlaid.
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