Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龙) has many unusual features. Despite being a martial arts movie, it is quite distinctive from other well known movies from the genre. (I have lost count of the movies that have copied the famous ‘hall of mirrors’ fight scene from Enter the Dragon.) The fight sequences in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are elegant. In fact, the whole movie is elegance personified.
The story happens in 18th-century Qing dynasty China and it really helps that Ang Lee (李安) is very well versed the Chinese culture. It saves the movie from having a touristic look, which is what you get when most Hollywood directors shoot in Europe or Asia. How is it that most of the dramatic scenes in these movies happen with the Colosseum, Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower in frame? Ang Lee spares us from scenes on the Great Wall or near the Temple of Heaven. The China that you get to see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has rarely been seen on screen outside China and it’s enchantingly beautiful.
Peter Pau received a well deserved Academy Award for Best Cinematography for this movie. Again, applying the simple test for good cinematography (Freeze any frame. Does it make a beautiful standalone photograph?) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon passes it with flying colours. There are so many memorable frames in the movie. China’s deserts, mountains and greenery are shown in their full splendour. There is a scene where Li Mu Bai (李慕白) played by Chow Yun-fat and Yu Shu Lien (俞秀蓮) played by Michelle Yeoh stop at a house in the first. It is an unusual house where you have these grey walls that have squares cut out from the walls as windows. It is surrounded by greenery so when seen from inside it looks like a painting for lush, live forest enclosed with grey border. Think about it. Have you ever seen such beauty in a martial arts movie? In some scenes, Ang Lee uses ‘pillow shots’ that are reminiscent of Yasujirō Ozu.
Ang Lee also find beauty in small, everyday things. When Yu She Lin visits Jen Yu (玉嬌龍) (Zhang Ziyi), she writes Yu’s name using Chinese calligraphy. Hardly a 20 second scene but it shows the beauty of calligraphy. Watching the fight scenes reminded me of Kill Bill : Volume 1, especially the climax sword fight in the snow. Quentin Tarantino made violence extraordinarily beautiful.
Ang Lee’s eye for beauty is also seen in Sense and Sensibility, based on Jane Austen’s famous novel. In an intense scene, Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) and Marianne (Kate Winslet) have a fight. Elinor (Emma Thompson) has made a cup of tea and brings it to her sister. Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne each retire to their rooms, banging the doors as they go and Elinor is left holding the cup. Here Ang Lee moves the camera up. From a top angle we see three closed while doors, Elinor wearing a hat, sitting on the stairs drinking the almond coloured tea.
A detour. This scene was possible because Elinor was drinking real tea in the scene. Do you know how many times actors are made to drink fake tea in empty cups? And we can tell that they are faking it. Why do directors do that??? Is it so expensive to provide real tea? The maestro, Satyajit Ray, made his actors drink real tea. I remember seeing it in Pratidwandi, Aranyer Din Ratri and Chiriyakhana. And in Jana Aranya, he made Somnath (Pradip Mukherjee) drink real lassi and even filmed the lassi being made.
Back to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The martial arts choreographer for the movie was Yuen Woo-Ping who also choreographed the Matrix series. There are no special effects in the movie except those used to remove the chord with which the actors were hanging while flying. Most stunts were done by the actors. The agility and ease with which the actors perform the sequences is simply breathtaking. When you are completely jaded from watching the same hackneyed action sequences with camera moving in 360 degrees without rhyme or reason (watch any recent Star Trek movie), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon feels like a breath of fresh air. There is a distinctive originality in the way the actors use their weapons, something that you often see Jackie Chan doing in his movies. The background music used for the action scenes does not have any modern instruments. In the restaurant fight scene, the main instrument in background music is actually a flute.
This is a fantasy movie so the characters can fly. But the flying is so different from the Wall Disney/Marvel way of flying. All of their Superheroes fly in a set pattern, with the notion that the greater the velocity, the more effective the scene is. In contrast, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the characters fly with easy and elegance and they don’t fly at the height of 40,000 feet like a Boeing 737. They make effortless jumps of few meters through the air and come back to Earth. In one scene, the actors balance themselves on top branches in a Bamboo forest and according to the director, it was the real actors who did the stunts.
In Physics, there was a long held notion that beauty is an inherent quality of nature. In the field of cinema however, after watching The Godfather or Better Call Saul, I am convinced that an eye for beauty is a sure sign of a great director/cinematographer.
