Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen
Have I Seen it Before: Ok. So, here’s the thing. Two things happened simultaneously in the early 2000s. First, this film was huge. Second, I was resoundingly disinterested in martial arts movies.
Naturally, at some party that would barely qualify as a party by any reasonable adolexcent standards, I was forced to sit down and watch the movie. I remember bits of it. I strangely remember the end of it. I also remembered I was resoundingly unimpressed by the whole thing.
Remember, I can be wrong.
Did I Like It: And was. While I think I couldn’t quite get over the graceful movements of the characters, as if it were just a bit too theatrical, as if it were the action movie equivalent of characters breaking out into song in a musical.
Now, that’s exactly the kind of stuff I think is cool. Western action cinema may have briefly tried to ape this movie, but they were more content to pull from The Matrix (1999) but nothing could quite match its delicate balance of both whimsy and earnestness, including this film’s eventual sequel, which no one has even suggested I—to say nothing of force me to—watch.
It is that earnestness, though, that strikes me most clearly all these years later. I’m willing to admit it might just be a cultural film, but the restraint Li Mu Bai (Chow) and Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh) are more convincing in the their absolute lethal competence mixed with desperate desire to stop fighting than nearly every action or genre star in the western canon. Every move is an act of restraint, whether they are haunted by their love for one another or they (mostly him) are trying exact vengence for past wrongs.
Honestly, if you haven’t watched it, you just need to sit your ass down right now. We’re going to fix that. I’d like to watch it again.