JUMP, FLY, AND WAIL



JUMP, FLY, AND WAIL

BY JOAN ACOCELLA

Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” received ten Academy award nominations. If there were a category for movement direction, the movie would surely have got eleven, for nothing is more central to its beauty and coherence than its fight sequences, created by Hong Kong’s foremost action choreographer, Yuen Wo Ping. Yuen comes from the action-movie clan. The family started out in Chinese opera, then moved into film. Yuen’s father made his living in martial-arts cinema, as do four of Yuen’s brothers. (One of them, Cheung Yan, directed the first scenes for the new “Charlies’s Angels.”) Yuen got his start as a stuntman in the pictures his father was working on. He was always the guy who died, he told the London Guardian. “I was very good at falling down dead.”

Hong Kong movies are made fast. As director or fight choreographer, Yuen, now fifty-five years old, has made fifty-odd movies. He specialized in historical epics, cop movies, and swashbucklers. These are all conventional forms, but eventually he began bending the conventions. He directed two of Jackie Chang’s earliest movies, and made him a star by turning him into a comic kung-fu master, as opposed to the grim Bruce Lee model. Two years ago, as the choreographer of “The Matrix,” Yuen entered the lists of American action movies, and lent that exploding-skyscraper genre a little stylishness by teaching kung-fu to Keanu Reeves, and by subjecting the cast to “wirework,” a Hong Hong extra whereby the fighters are attached to wires, like Peter Pan, so that they can move upwards as well as in the usual directions. (The wires are digitally erased from the print.) At one point in “The Matrix,” Keanu Reeves, standing on a subway track and happening to notice that a train is bearing down on him, levitates about ten feet into the air, does a backflip, and alights on the subway platform. All of us

would like to do this, and such feats leaven the film’s violence with sort of joy.

Yuen has been using wirework for a while now. And, “The Matrix” nor-withstanding, he is making it serve purposes beyond excitement. “I am more into the softer styles,” he told an interviewer recently, “rather than the hard, fast cut-cut-cut of a lot of movies, so I use the wire to bring that out.” By producing a longer arc of action, wirework allows for longer takes-hence, expansion, afterthoughts, fantasy.

The moody lyricism of “Crouching Tiger” is not all Yuen’s. Ang Lee has said that what he wanted was “kind of a dream of china,” and he got it. The story takes place in the seventeenth century. The central character is a highborn girl, Jen Yu, (Zhang Ziyi), who is about to be married off to a rich man. She wants no part of him, however. All she wants is a life of love and adventure, the life of an wuxia, or Chinese knight-errant. The characters grouped around her, notably Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat), an exemplary wuxia, and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), his beloved, exist to show her that the life of daring she longs for is an illusion.

Strange to say, that lesson is taught primarily through the fight scenes. Some, admittedly, are there just for the sheer Hong Kong fun of it. We get the kung-fu repertoire-the twirling kicks and aerial flips-and also the marvelous weaponry. (I especially liked the shoes with retractable knives.) Then there is the wirework, allowing the combatants to perform all manner of aviational maneuvers and, once the foe is gasping in the dirt, to zoom off into the sky, trailing, in one scene, a great helix of ribbons. The ribbons are for the ladies. In “Crouching Tiger,” as in much of Hong Kong cinema, the women are as serious about martial arts as men. (When Jen asks the soulful beauty Shu Lien if she is a swordfighter, she answers, “Yes, I am, but I prefer the machete.”) None of the movie’s fights show a man in sole combat with a man. Always, there is a woman.

One skirmish in particular, in which Jen, disguised as a boy, takes on a whole restaurant full of hoodlums, seems designed to satisfy Hong Kong expectations. As it starts, Jen, holding her teacup in one hand, fights a man with the other hand, and doesn’t spill a drop. Then she gets annoyed-her meal has been interrupted-and, putting down her tea, she single-handedly battles about fifty more men, meanwhile vaulting from balcony to balcony and somersaulting backward down a staircase. She ends by chanting a little ode to her prowess and performing a dance-a real dance, to the beat. She twirls her sword like a baton, does a grand battement, then twirls the sword some more, pirouetting all the while, and ends in an exclamatory posture, her arm raised to Heaven. In honor of her performance, a balcony crashes sonorously to the floor. If Donald O’Connor had been Chinese, this is a routine he might have done.

But the other fights in “Crouching Tiger” are more abstemious, more symbolic. The settings, to start with, are fantastic-moonlit courtyards, desert dunes-and fantastically filmed. Drums sound, adding to the mystery. The most amazing encounter, as the reviewers noticed, takes place between Jen and Mu Bai in a bamboo forest. The forest is green, green-a green that you never imagined-and it looks like fur, it’s so thick. Into this surrealist medium fly Jen and Mu Bai, like white birds. Their combat takes place in the trees, which are swaying in the wind. Not many blows are struck; not many can be, because the antagonists are too busy trying to keep their footing on the trunks of the bending bamboos. ( Normally, in wired scenes, Yuen uses about fifteen technicians. For this scene, he needed a crew of forty.) If “Crouching Tiger” is a dream of China, this fight is a dream of kung-fu. The camera pauses for close-ups: Mu Bai standing on a branch with the calm of a Buddha, Jen falling backward in what looks like an erotic trance. Everything is slow, ruminative.

“Crouching Tiger” is about honor and feeling, and it is primarily for the sake of those matters that we have the wires: to take the movie up, to higher things. Most of the wirework is not what you would call dancing. The filmmakers may digitally erase the wires, but they cannot erase the wires’ effects. We see the yank as the actors are lifted into the air. When they come down, we see them struggle for their land legs. Actually, wirework is the opposite of dancing, which is a constant negotiation with the very force of gravity that the wires cancel out. (In ballet, the reason a jump is exciting is that the dancer is going up, and staying up, when gravity wants her to come down.) And how much can human beings do in the air? They can stretch their arms out to make them look like wings; they can point their toes to make them look pretty. If they’re in an alley, they can smack their feet against the masonry, to make it seem as though they were climbing the walls. But that’s about it.

So the wirework is limited, and also artificial, but, like other artifices-head voices in opera, point work in ballet-it can create a poetic image, and give things a certain lilt and unexpectedness. Looking at “Crouching Tiger,” I thought a little bit about Tao, and a lot more about the movies. I thought about silent comedy. (Keaton and Chaplin were better movement artists than anyone in “Crouching Tiger.”) I thought about the musicals of the thirties, and how the dance numbers delivered the kind of fantasy-pure, transporting, nonrealistic-that people want from cinema. That fantasy is still being delivered, but not by musicals. (The last really good movie musical, “West Side Story,” was made in 1961.) It is the action movies that are producing it. Most action films are very stupid-including “The Matrix,” despite Yuen’s efforts-but they are giving people something that they desperately want on Saturday night, and this is why they are so popular.

Kung-fu movies are an odd place to look for the salvation of cinema. Nothing could be more formulaic, more gone-in-a-second. And nothing could be more low-class. Every time I have seen a kung-fu movie, it has been in a theatre where your shoes stick to the floor. But often it is humble genres such as this-forms unprotected by rules and history, so that brave minds can attach to them and do something interesting-that take us into a new place. In the eighteen century, the novel was such a genre. Likewise, photography in the nineteenth century, and cinema itself in the early twentieth.

 

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