'Crouching Tiger': Top-Flight Tale By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, December 22, 2000

Zhang Ziyi gets her awe-inspiring kicks in Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." (Chan Kam Chuen)

And these were the chicks.

And these are the considerable, even sublime, pleasures of Ang Lee's dreamy enchantment of a movie, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which is chop-socky for the caviar set. Envisioned as a romantic flying-fists/slashing-blade opera – perhaps "myth" would be a better word – the movie is set in a magical time and place, a green and ancient China where a class of noble knights and fighters (called Wuxia) stride through the land famously, righting wrongs and combating injustice. It follows the interactions of two legendary warriors; a trio of dastardly, murderous villains; and a newcomer who is prodigiously gifted.

The great Chinese American director Ang Lee is uniquely situated to deliver this sort of thing. Growing up on Taiwan, he loved the kung-fu and swordplay movies; then he moved to the United States, went to the University of Illinois and New York University's film school, and built a career in brilliant Chinese American domestic drama ("Eat Drink Man Woman" is probably the best known) before moving on to novels by Jane Austen and Rick Moody (adaptations of "Sense and Sensibility" and "The Ice Storm") and even a pretty good Civil War-era western, "Ride With the Devil."

So in a sense, he's using his sophisticated adult sensibility, with its understanding of technique and irony and other narrative refinements, to recover the essence of his own childhood's purest movie pleasure: fightin', kissin' and flyin'. The movie's greatest thrill, then, is its honest, unforced child's vision; it seems simple and innocent, very much in the vein of Spielberg's great early work, as in "E.T." and "Jaws."

The movie is knit around Green Destiny, a singing sword (or rather, a vibrating one) that has helped the Wuxia prince Li Mu Bai (played by a dignified Chow Yun Fat) to defend the weak and avenge the poor for years. But now Li is tired; he has killed too much and he seeks a more contemplative life. He hands it over to his colleague Yu Shu Lien (the fabulous Michelle Yeoh) for transport to an old friend. We understand a number of things at once: that between Li and Yu there are feelings all the more powerful for their repression, and that Green Destiny will not remain out of action for long.

Indeed a few nights later, a mysteriously lithe, quick bandit steals the weapon, despite the best attempts of Yu. It is here that we first taste the movie's headiest delight: the fight choreography and wire work of Yuen Wo-Ping. (Famous in the East for decades, he became world-famous for puppeting Keanu Reeves and Carrie Moss through the air in "The Matrix.") It is by this magic that the performers scamper through the air, like Pans and Wendys, like fairies and superheroes, like the prepubescents of "E.T."

It's not quite flight, but you could be excused for thinking so. Rather it's some kind of provisional victory over gravity so that in a certain mindset a running leap will propel a fighter not 20 feet but 200; rooftops become stones in the pond of the air, and walls are vertical pathways, as the players leap through the air with the greatest of ease while trying to cut each other into moo goo gai pan.

But so lithe and delicate and quick is Yu's masked opponent that we also suspect that he may not be a he at all. He may be a she. And soon enough we tumble to the epiphany that the young and pretty girl-child Jen (19-year-old Zhang Ziyi) who seemed so admiring of Yu's skills and life may be a more advanced pupil than Yu thought.

The plot is really more like a sword fight itself than any western paradigm of narrative logic. It sweeps, it whirls, it moves with unbelievable quickness and finesse as these three martial-arts champions – Li, Yu and, yes, Jen – are caught up in a conflict over the destiny of Green Destiny that causes all of them to examine who they are, what they believe in, whom they love and what their duty is.

For it seems Jen is allied with the evil Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei), a cunning female bandit who has a long past with both Li and Yu. At the same time, she is pursued by Lo (Chang Chen), a rapscallion of a bandit who shared adventures (recounted in elaborate flashback) with Jen in the desert. Meanwhile, Li and Yu struggle to get the sword back.

A whole lot goes on. Clang clang clang went the sword fight, ding ding ding went the duel, zing zing zing went my heartstrings, when the long blades came out and begin to whisper and sizzle through the air. It's largely a lost movie joy now, but any old goats who loved it when Flynn and Rathbone squared off in "Captain Blood" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood," or when Chuck Heston and Sophia Loren's champion went at it in "El Cid" will truly adore this rippling wonderful movie.

For those who prefer their martial arts with less ringing of steel blades and more breaking of bones will never see a better sequence than the one in which Jen – Ziyi has just become the world's next instant movie star, as of this weekend – goes one-on-50 with a gang of bandits in an inn. Jackie Chan, move over.

And, by the way, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, move over. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the destiny of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is very green.

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (120 minutes) is rated PG-13 for sword violence and sexual innuendo.