Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 24 October

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Lee, 2000)

By Boxing Day 2000 I was back work­ing at the Paramount pic­ture theatre in Wellington and we had exclus­ive rights to the hot­test art­house tick­et in town: And Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Audiences had been wait­ing eagerly for it since it wowed the Cannes crowd six months earli­er. In those days, anti­cip­a­tion was everything.

Also in those days, we didn’t have com­pu­ter­ised tick­et­ing – let alone online book­ings – so no way to man­age advanced sales.

Imagine our sur­prise – turn­ing to ter­ror – when we opened up to queues down the street and around the corner as every single ses­sion that day sold out. The Paramount had almost 700 seats in those days.

It was the golden age of art­house cinema in Wellington and I’m not sure if any­thing was as big as Crouching Tiger was that hol­i­day season.

Swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) vis­its his old friend You Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh, Best Actress Oscar win­ner for Everything Everywhere All at Once) and con­fesses that his heart is no longer in the viol­ent pro­tec­tion busi­ness and that he intends to retire. His fam­ous sword “Green Destiny” is no longer any use to him and he asks her to give it to Peking power-broker Sir Te (Lang Sihung) so he can go off into the hills and meditate.

Word of the pres­ence of the sword in Sir Te’s house gets out and attempts are made to steal it. Dangerous ban­dit Jade Fox is repor­ted to be in town Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), daugh­ter of Governor Yu, is look­ing to break free of her oblig­a­tions to make a polit­ic­al mar­riage and live an inde­pend­ent – and action-packed – life of her own.

All con­verge in the hunt for the sword, hop­ing that it will give them what they want.

Arguably the first time that clas­sic Wuxia cine­mat­ic tech­niques had broken out of the cult kung-fu movie ghetto for Western audi­ences, dir­ect­or Ang Lee shoots the action sequences superbly. Early digit­al VFX is used to remove the wires sus­pend­ing the act­ors but the cam­era move­ment is so flu­id and the skills of the per­formers so supreme that effects like that are hardly necessary.

The music by Tan Dun (with soloist Yo-Yo Ma) bril­liantly sup­ports all the film’s moods and the cine­ma­to­graphy by Peter Pau ensures that the mag­ni­fi­cent loc­a­tions are show­cased at their most glorious.

But it’s the heart of the film that ulti­mately moves an audience.

Watching it again the oth­er night I was struck by how per­fectly bal­anced the two love stor­ies are – in fact all the rela­tion­ships are so expertly con­struc­ted and the plot designed to ensure max­im­um dis­ap­point­ment for every­one. It’s rare that some­thing so tra­gic can also be so exciting.

Where can I find Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

We watched it as a 4K UHD disc from an amaz­ing box set cel­eb­rat­ing 30 years of Sony Pictures Classics but the stan­dalone UHD disc is still avail­able from some out­lets in Australia or from sellers on TradeMe here in NZ.

NZ Digital: You can rent it from Apple, Microsoft or AroVision

Aus Digital: You can stream from Foxtel or rent from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.

USA Digital: Rent or buy from all the usu­al outlets

UK Digital: Rent or buy from all the usu­al out­lets but no stream­ing offer

Obviously, these details can shift around a bit as titles move between stream­ers. No guar­an­tees of accur­acy after today.

Editor’s note

This is a bit of a test of how the pay­wall will work on non-recycled mater­i­al. I’ll keep tweak­ing how it works to ensure max­im­um sat­is­fac­tion for sub­scribers. I’m very grate­ful to you all.