Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is a martial arts film whose real subject is what goes unsaid. Li Mu Bai decides to stop fighting and entrusts his sword to a friend. It is stolen. Pursuing it, a young woman appears: Jen, from a noble family, about to be married off, and a fighter nobody knows about. The film carries two love stories and neither is spoken. Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien have loved each other for years and never say so. Jen's story in the desert is the opposite: everything is said and none of it is possible. Yuen Woo-ping choreographed the fights. The wirework is not a display but a means of stating a character's emotional condition: the fight in the bamboo forest is less a fight than an argument. There was an odd language problem in production. The film is in Mandarin, but Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat are Cantonese speakers. Both learned their lines by sound, and Ang Lee later said it was the hardest thing on the set. Yeoh badly injured her knee during shooting and production paused for weeks. It won the foreign language film Oscar and became the highest grossing foreign language film in America to that point. It runs 120 minutes. Good for: martial arts cinema, romantic drama, and visual work. Less good for: the pace is slow for a fighting film and the ending is left unresolved.