Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been eagerly consumed by enthusiastic Western audiences. In East Asia it was barely tasted. Questioned about the film by a BBC World Service journalist eager to find a partner in multiculturalism, a Singaporean film scholar can hardly utter monosyllables in response.
An eye roving over western print media cannot evade the images of Michelle Yeoh, the film’s seasoned martial heroine, especially now as she parades before the paparazzi in a transformed post-movie look (red hair). Despite winning neither, Ang Lee was nominated for the coveted “best film” and “best director” accolades in this year’s Oscars. But his achievement is accompanied by complete indifference from home. What kind of a meeting of West and East is this?
Briefly, Crouching Tiger is a love story set amidst a personality-driven political cycle populated by the Wuxia martial artists, of early 19th century China, and their enemies. Based on a section of a novel of the same name written in the pre-war years of the 20th century, the script was worked on by long-time Lee collaborator James Schamus and the action sequences by martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, previously employed in The Matrix, but showing markedly improved results here, given Chinese actors.
Pure export
What is particular about Crouching Tiger is that it is pure export. So clever is its adaptation of the most universally appealing elements of a popular domestic genre, its market of origin is disenchanted. Their own cinematic traditions have been turned into a tourist attraction, coloured beads from which they turn away.
If I close my eyes I can still see the delicate warrior-maiden played by newcomer Zhang Ziyi confronting her would-be teacher, played by megastar Chow Yun Fat, as both perch impossibly on the swaying branches of a forest of bamboo — as only true gong fu legends can. Whilst some might ridicule the wire-enabled parabolas of actors who swoop, clash and somersault their way over and beyond the gables and courtyards of the imperial city, even critical minds can enjoy the stunning sense of space and freedom from the pained realism of the American “stunt” that Yuen Wo Ping’s choreography supplies. And the quick tableaux where, behind the necessary etiquette, host and guest hint at the movements of high politics, contrast successfully with the frantic world of conflict into which this polite society plunges as night falls.
It is the brilliant and playful cynicism with which Ang Lee has marshalled such elements that annoyed and bored Chinese-speaking audiences, as well as cultural gate-keepers elsewhere. Crouching Tiger presents a series of related Chinese dramatic conventions along the classic lines of Mission Impossible, in which the audience willingly imbibes the ironic puppetry that manipulates the elements of plot.
In the case of Crouching Tiger, Western audiences are either less aware of this strategy because of the unfamiliar content and can relax into a more child-like state of pure appreciation, or they see through it but choose to connive in their own deception as Hollywood has taught. Or perhaps both. It may be less a matter of Orientalism that leads western audiences to half-believe that intense meditation allows eastern experts to fly, than a shrewd Occidentalism which knows how to put its finger on their longings.
There is a masterly and familiar knowingness in Crouching Tiger. Themes such as the life-long deception of her teacher by a brilliant student, politically inexpedient love, or a warrior seeking tranquillity after a life of murder and mayhem – only to be sucked back into the maelstrom by higher loyalties – are presented as genuine drama. They have been and always will be, but in Crouching Tiger their hurried amalgamation in a “delivery vehicle” aimed at the Western market becomes so sentimental, and so successful, it embarrasses Chinese and other aficionados. Could its sheer professionalism expose the tackiness in their own affections? It is better to express indifference.
Jane Austen in Kowloon, or more?
As a cultural “moment”, Crouching Tiger is genuine enough; endless adaptation is an essential part of the Chinese tradition of literature. Let us take, for example, a memorable scene — the diminutive but superhumanly capable Jen (Zhang Ziyi), travelling incognito as a young gallant to disguise her ministerial descent, demolishes an inn and comically chastens the egos of a number of sceptical roughs. If we turn to the annals of Chinese literature, a similar figure appears among the novels of adventure and detection of the Qing dynasty (1644—1911), in the form of The Gallant Maid (Er Nu Ying Xiong Zhuan). As China’s greatest 20th-century writer Lu Xun later commented, “Because the author set out to combine heroism and the traditional feminine virtues in her person, the result is somewhat fantastic. In fact the gallant maid talks and behaves in an artificial way whenever she appears.”
Zhang’s character is more morally ambiguous, artful and evolving than this. However, those who believe that Crouching Tiger is a somewhat forced combination of Jane Austen (understated, difficult love) and Kowloon martial arts (the student outshines the master — but to what end?) miss the fact that other ages and their authors may produce equally unlikely hybrids, whether in plot or character.
Crouching Tiger is consequently something of a trap for critics. They may harp on the ironies of combining Eastern and Western cultural modes, hoping to emerge with the bit of globalisation in the teeth of their insight, with they themselves gripping the reins. But the actual content of Crouching Tiger as a media phenomenon is not so easily categorised. Ang Lee is a director able to observe in subtle and quite wry detail the private lives of adulterous, wealthy liberals in 1970s Connecticut (in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm), and to do so with as much wit and irony as he views the Wuxia warriors – if not more.
A hegemonic ambition
When Lee presents these warriors, they seem to wing their way to us as emissaries of another culture. They deceive as such — they are manifestations of a contemporary project. Lee’s ambition in Crouching Tiger is a hegemonic one crafted towards maximum box office.
He forced Michelle Yeoh, whose English was fluent compared to her rudimentary pre-production Mandarin, to learn the latter’s crisp phonetics, which originated in Qing officialdom’s attempts to transcend local dialects. Over and over again she was forced to repeat scenes if one syllable was misplaced. Against the grain, Lee drew into the pan-Chinese language space of his direction an actress who commands the south east Asian market and its connections to global marketing.
Himself from Taiwan, Lee’s own Mandarin is presumably closer to the slushy and more sibilant version found there and in neighbouring Fujian. Accordingly, his insistence on capturing the purity of northern Mandarin was part of an effort to create a true product of the Greater China region.
The Wild West
But Western sensibilities were ever (unlike origin as in the case of Goethe) the goal. Crouching Tiger is plainly a project to make a genre movie that would sell far beyond its traditional market. We do not have to go far to see the methods Lee employed. A key component of Crouching Tiger is the beautiful superficiality of the characters, which mirrors that of the plot. Their dilemmas, pain and turmoil are evanescent things to be forgotten in the stupendous technical excellence of the next fight scene. This breaks from the usual tragic-apocalyptic plot progression of the classic martial arts genre. The addition of exotic love to the plot, between Zhang Ziyi’s confused teenager and a non-Han rebel (although he is no Muslim), is another element that traditional Chinese ideals of femininity – including those of the Gallant Maid – could not have encompassed.
Their love stands out from the film as a strange excursion from more familiar themes of uncertain allegiance and defence of honour. As an episode, it creates a sort of hyperspatial access point to the Western market combining a stagecoach chase, a sharp-shooting, raunchy but loving “cowgirl”, and a Romeo and Juliet romance between her and the young Indian chief, all in scenery that puts Death Valley to shame.
Through it, Lee teleports his project into the richest and most powerful hemisphere. Love in the far western desert which must be nothing more than a fleeting dream or if not, a fatal political choice, drips with such compelling simplicity as a plot device that even the least jaded must wonder at Lee’s art here, in composing something so accessible to modern times. The overwhelmingly gentle irony of Edward Yang’s Yi Yi this is not. Rather, another benign gift for the American Empire.
Lee is more than an adept student of the Hollywood magic. He knows how to clothe simulacra of the Hollywood tradition in genuine Chinese garb. His talents exceed that proverbial magic, although to what end other than fame is unclear. With him he brings the celebrity cellist Yo-yo Ma and score composer Tan Dun, who are also surfing the Crouching Tiger superhighway, like immortals on an unsinkable raft, into the homes and box office of the West.
