Early in the film Chow Yun Fat's swordsman Bai Li Mu hands his weapon named The Green Destiny to fellow warrior Lien Yu Shu (Michelle Yeoh), asking her to give it to a common friend to hide-- he's retiring from a life of bloodshed, he tells her. Cut to the friend's house: Yeoh has the sword wrapped in a cloth when she bumps into another guest, the Governor's daughter Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a woman she has never met before, and what does she do next? Pulls out the sword and starts showing it off.
Granted Lien must be proud of her colleague's legendary blade-- but Bai had entrusted her with the sword! For safekeeping! And here she is, explaining the sword's history as if hoping Jen would buy it on the spot. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is being marketed as a character-driven martial-arts epic, but this early in the film character credibility takes a blow right in its narrative testicles and never quite recovers. Not to mention the scene is a dead giveaway as to what happens next: will the sword be stolen, and by the very person Lien has just paraded it to? Take a wild guess.
Lien and Jen (and later Bai) take to the air in a display of state-of-the-art wirework-- the wires digitally removed to add realism-- and they're slow as molasses. After years of kung-fu warriors leaping from the ground, caroming off walls, rooftops, bamboo trees, trying to achieve a kind of realism (or at least nominal plausibility) through speed, careful camerawork, and deft editing, here is a film with the budget to do it right-- with more realism than was ever before possible-- and we promptly get a display of antigravity.
Which may be a reactionary response, but film historian and expert David Bordwell (Planet Hong Kong) describes kung-fu as having a physics of its own, where the laws of motion and gravity may be stretched or bent, but never broken. Jet Li in Once Upon a Time in China may corkscrew into the air for his 'no-shadow kick, but he does so strictly under his own leg-power. Donnie Yen in Once Upon a Time in China 2 can use a wet bedsheet to shatter concrete, but he's simply following the principle that cloth soaked and twisted tight has greater tensile strength. Only supernatural beings-- ghosts, gods, demons, Linda Blair-- actually float; a sign of otherworldly power, not martial-arts prowess.
And what's with all the pseudo-poetry? Bai at one point describes to Lien how "time and space stopped" as if just having read Stephen Hawking; Jen lies next to her lover Lo (Chang Chen), who muses about how "thousands of stars fell from the sky... I rode out to the edge of the desert, to look for them." Fine talk for a Hollywood romance, but I can't remember the last time I heard someone in a wuxia film speak like that. Martial-arts warriors are never verbally eloquent; they expressed themselves with their limbs, not their tongues. Even when in love their dialogue is very practical, very down-to-earth; love is rarely declared, or at most is alluded to in exchanges.
In The Bride With White Hair-- a genuinely romantic wuxia epic-- Brigitte Lin asks Leslie Cheung "will you still want me when my hair is all white?" Cheung replies that he'll get her a flower that, when eaten, will grant her immortality, so that her hair will never whiten. All fine and poetic, except that later in the film, Lin's hair does turn white at Cheung's betrayal, and she leaves him; Cheung, in reparation, sits for decades by the flower that grants immortality, waiting for her to come back. Part of the beauty of Bride is that what for us may seem like romantic hyperbole is for them immediate and real. Problem with white hair? Flower of immortality should solve it. Lost your loved one? Wait a few decades, she'll be along. In Crouching Tiger, the plot isn't half as flowery as the dialogue, and that grates on the ear.
Mere details, maybe (I haven't even mentioned the poorly synchronized dubbing), irritating only to wuxia afficionados and about which ordinary audiences couldn't care less... but it's the sheer wrongheadedness of approach taken by the film's director that bothers me most.
Lee probably felt he had something fresh-- gallant warriors with complex motives, in a kung fu flick!-- except a few details (the inn; the bamboo grove; the noble veterans played by Chow and Yeoh; even Jade Fox, heroine of Come Drink With Me and played by the same actress, Cheng Peipei) give the game away: what he's really doing is remaking King Hu films, but with Hollywood-sized budget and special effects. A pointless exercise, I think-- Hu accomplished with his films (A Touch of Zen, The Valiant Ones) all that Lee hopes to accomplish with this one: complexity of narrative, nobility of character, high tragedy, bold innovation; all done with little strain or pretension, and all made with less money. More, Hu's films move like lightning, helped along by his experimental editing style; Lee's film plods--handsomely, it must be said-- towards its rather toothless conclusion.
Having said all that, I don't think Crouching Tiger is a terrible film, really just not a very interesting one. It's worth seeing for the gorgeous Chinese landscapes, for Michelle Yeoh's heroic serenity, and for Yuen Woo Ping's wonderful fight choreography (though not his best work--see the Once Upon a Time in China films, or Iron Monkey). After all the hype we've heard the past few months, however (Richard Corliss of Time Magazine considered it one of the best things he saw at this year's Cannes Film Festival), you can't help but feel that it's an an insult to the genuine article.
11/19/00
No comments:
Post a Comment