Ang does what Hollywood can't

10 April 2012

Time was when socalled "globalisation" was actually a

de facto

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has changed all that. Ang Lee's startling martial arts romance, a tale of thwarted love and tortured honour among warriors in Han Dynasty China, has touched a chord with film-goers on both sides of the Atlantic. It is currently cutting the West-Coast competition into noodles, and is shaping up to be the cult cultural phenomenon of the year.

The film's across-the-board success with British critics has been mirrored in cinemas. Crouching Tiger took £686,198 at the box-office in its opening weekend in Britain: significantly more than best-performing new US film Bless the Child, and six times the amount taken by the most successful foreign-language film to date, Life is Beautiful. Its release to 88 cinemas - again, an unusually wide one for a foreign-language film, especially a non-European one - will be widened further by distributors Columbia TriStar as from today. In the US, it has so far pulled in $19 million (£12.6 million) and is already tipped as a winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar, if not Best Picture.

NOW, few, if any of us, were aware that we cared about the stiff moral and martial codes of the Wudan fighting system before Ang Lee apprised us of them. Martial arts films, with their balletic fight sequences, have largely been a minority interest on these shores, their exposure limited to the racks of Jackie Chan videos and the watered-down American versions fed to us by devotees like Quentin Tarantino. Ang Lee's great success, confounding critics who said that returning to his Chinese roots after "main-stream" successes like Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm would be a form of career suicide, is to make this rarefied, 18th century oriental world accessible to all.

There is one simple reason for this. American movies (which, to the world at large, means movies in general) have become just as much a faceless, formulaic brand as the corporate products so roundly decried in Naomi Klein's anti-capitalist treatise, No Logo. There is as little difference between an Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbuster and a low-budget "indepen-dent" American flick as there is between Diet and "fat" Coke.

We may never get entirely bored with consuming either the American dream or the American nightmare, but we sometimes yearn for something different. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes as a piquant Sichuan dish after years of McDonald's (alleviated by the occasional fish-and-chips British film).

Lee's coup is to have taken the specific and made it universal. The combat sequences are elevated far above the level of chop-socky mayhem by the sheer grace of Yuen Wo Ping's choreography (he also worked on The Matrix, and most of Jackie Chan's Hong Kong pictures), and Lee's painterly way of setting them against devastatingly beautiful scenery.

They are as sophisticated as any American action sequence, but the emphasis on the actors' physical prowess and the use of wires rather than clever-dick camera trickery gives them more of a human dimension. Forget Superman: here, you really do believe that a man - or a woman - can fly.

In addition to the ravishing physical skills of the main players, they bring vast emotional credibility to their roles. The parallel, doomed love affairs between the code-bound Wudan warriors (Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh) and the spoiled, criminal rich girl and her bandit boyfriend (Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen) are invested with a deep and solemn conviction. These characters' romantic problems may be culturally and historically distant from us, but Lee and his cast paint the anguish in such broad, bold strokes that it is easier for the world's cinema-goers to empathise with than, say, romantic schmaltz starring Sandra Bullock.

The director, who was born in Taiwan to mainland Chinese parents and studied film in the States, has a unique ability to tap into a vein of human experience that transcends national boundaries. His first film, The Wedding Banquet, was a comedy about a gay New Yorker entering into a marriage of convenience to please his Taiwanese parents; his second, Eat Drink Man Woman, was about a Taiwanese chef's relationship with his children. On the basis of these two movies, Emma Thompson rather improbably declared he was the only man who could direct her script of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and was, even more improbably, proved right.

LEE turned out to be equally at home with American society at the pivotal, schismatic moments of the Civil War (Ride With the Devil) and the 1970s (The Ice Storm). A Chinese director who could sell America back to the Americans, and Austen's England back to the British, was always going to make something that returned to his country's own history. At the very least, he's directed the first kung fu movie to cross over to a global audience.

The surprise success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon should not be a surprise at all. If further evidence were needed that we are looking beyond Hollywood for our universal stories, it can be found in last year's biggest movie, Gladiator. An American blockbuster by birth, but directed by an Englishman with a mostly British cast and a Kiwi star, it used gladiatorial combat in exactly the same way that Crouching Tiger uses martial arts - to buttress a simple, affecting human story, comprehensible to anyone, anywhere.

Films about the Roman and the Chinese empire have challenged the hegemony of the Hollywood product and conquered the world. Globalisation isn't what it used to be.

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