Ang Lee (Taiwan, born 1954)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Sometimes, when working through the films on this list, I wonder if a movie has been lauded primarily because it contains shots or entire sequences that must have been really difficult to pull off, requiring an awful lot of time, effort and skill to orchestrate. This has been most observable in the action films of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Dark Knight, though it was also present in more serious, less easily definable works such as City of God, Children of Men and Zero Dark Thirty. 

Anyway, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon contains such sequences, and they’re pretty impressive. You can’t really have any other reaction other than excitement when you see people running up and down buildings in a live-action setting, like a flesh-and-blood version of the free-running feature in the video game series Assassin’s Creed (I would not be surprised, in fact, if this very movie was where the game developers got the original idea).

Elsewhere, the film aims for successes in a variety of areas. If nothing else, the emphasis the movie places on story makes it clear, in and of itself, that this is not supposed to be a swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery extravaganza and nothing else. It wants to be a love story. It wants to be a meditative think-piece. It wants to document Jen Yu’s coming of age, and possibly even allegorise the struggles a young person goes through in the process of self-actualisation.

Jen Yu’s portrayal is erratic and immature, yet simultaneously sympathetic. This character-based nuance, and others, add depth and dramatic substance to a piece which, as a direct result of its ambitious reach, sometimes errs on the wrong side of trite. Providing yet more distinction and anchorage are the central performances from Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh, whose respective heroic qualities exude dignity from every pore, nicely underplayed by both. The same cannot be said for Cheng Pei-pei’s turn as the pantomime villain Jade Fox, or the buffoonish henchmen-esque adversaries that are summarily dispatched across the movie, but these elements also contribute to the picture’s polyphonic, versatile quality, as well as making our heroes look even more sage.

When watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I had to bear in mind that this is an eastern film, and if it features elements that a viewer like myself might find odd or disconcerting, in this case a tendency toward the overcooked and the melodramatic, then a certain amount of effort should be made to receive them in the spirit they were intended, one which may quite feasibly be outside my sphere of comprehension. Here, this was a process I found much easier than those which accompanied Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, Oldboy, The Assassin and Spirited Away, all experiences which, to varying extents, left me decidedly nonplussed. Not so with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This was an enjoyable movie whose perceived faults did not detract from its overall impact and generally came over as idiosyncratic charm, sitting with relative comfort within the film’s robust, vibrant and altogether rather ravishing tapestry.

Brokeback Mountain (2005)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

As Brokeback Mountain opens and unfolds, we see Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) both being employed on a seasonal basis as ranch-hands. It’s the early 60s. They’re left to their own devices, and apparently have the whole mountain to themselves, though we do see later that their situation isn’t as private as it appears.

After a certain unspecified amount of time, after having gotten to know each other a little, they end up having sex. The initial encounter is played out as an impulsive moment that comes about suddenly and fast. It’s not clear whether their actions are based on a physical attraction, an emotional connection, or the culmination of long-withheld homosexual feelings that were brewing in the backgrounds of both men’s lives prior to the events of the film. It could even, in theory, have been instigated by something akin to boredom.

Neither man seems particularly gay (both, in fact, insist that they’re not). This could be a comment on the era- they would have been conditioned by society to ‘act straight’ for simple reasons of self-preservation; we can see echoes of such notions in Carol, where Cate Blanchett’s titular character laments that she’s ‘living against [her] own grain’. Another parallel with the Haynes piece is the issue of privacy- Carol and Therese drive hundreds of miles across the country to try to find some, and within the walls of their purchased and paid-for motel room should have been able to do anything they wanted, within reason, only to find that they have been followed the entire time and are even being recorded.  

Whether this recurring theme is a conscious filmic reflector that the homosexual community are under an unnaturally high level of scrutiny, and feel their lives are being disproportionately interfered with, or is merely something of a coincidence, is a matter of debate, though such a thing was certainly observable during the bygone decades in which both Brokeback Mountain and Carol are set. Similar things could be said of the potential interracial relationship in Far From Heaven, which might have been the defining love story of Cathy and Raymond’s lives if other people had deigned to stop rubbernecking and just let them alone.

I found Brokeback Mountain’s central tryst to have more ambiguity and less definition. At one point, for example, the two men don’t even see each other for four years. The movie explores the difficulties that arise when two people are in a relationship- and here the word ‘relationship’ is used rather loosely- where one of the partners is more in love than the other one is, and wants more than the other does. Its most pertinent question, for me, was exactly why Ennis won’t acquiesce to Jack’s suggestions and wishes of co-habitation. The easy option would be to construe that it’s because he just can’t handle the notion of society suspecting he’s gay, or bi- that’s if he could even reconcile it with himself, which he barely seems able to. It would be an understandable, recognisable trait, and his violent reaction to his ex-wife’s questions and inferences would also support such a supposition. However, I’m not entirely convinced. That’s not to say that this concern isn’t a factor- it definitely is, the inferences are unequivocal- but I also think it's quite possible that he simply doesn’t want to set up home with Jack, and make the union permanent- he enjoys their time together, and feels genuine affection, but he’s happy to only see him three or four times a year, and the current arrangement suits him.

Over the course of the film I got the impression of Ennis as someone who is disinclined to put himself out for anyone or anything. This goes against the portrayal that the movie affords to him, which is clearly supposed to be sympathetic- rather generously, I feel. Almost all of the movie’s problems, such as they are, can be traced back to him. He knows that he’s never going to fulfil Jack’s wishes, and that Jack is more invested in the relationship than he is, yet chooses to drag the situation out over two decades instead of doing the merciful thing and cutting him loose. He takes a wife that he knows he doesn’t love and wastes twelve years of her life. He takes another female partner later in the picture and simply goes AWOL on her one day, with no explanation, leaving her to deal with the crushing emotional tumult brought about by such an act. His daughter is having a bad time at home and asks if she can come and live with him and he says no. She later tells him she’s getting married and although he ultimately agrees to attend the wedding, his first reaction is to say he can’t make it because he has to do some ranching. In the film’s poignant final scene (spoiler alert), when he mourns Jack, this is not necessarily out of ‘love’, as many critics have surmised- at least not in the overarching romantic sense, anyway. He might simply miss his friend, the one he happened to have sex with, and miss the routine he had of ‘getting away from it all’ and escaping into the mountains every few months with someone whose company he enjoyed. The tragic events have put this internal, relied-upon schedule out of whack, just as his daughter moving in with him would also have done, and while he is clearly upset, and wishes things could go back to how they were, this is not the same thing as a desperate yearning for someone with whom you were hopelessly in love.

Am I being too hard on the guy? Maybe. This is one of the film’s strengths- there are different angles from which you can assess it, and different ways in which you can make judgements about its flawed characters. There is an argument that the stoic and taciturn Ennis doesn’t know what he wants and is chronically indecisive; even as I make criticisms of him, it would be difficult to assert with any conviction that he hurts other people on purpose. He looks to me to be a loner who finds himself in entanglements with other people almost by accident. His children may have come about as something of an accident too. He dips his toe in the water of relationships (including, as noted, a twelve-year marriage), but the practical nuances of maintaining these relationships- taking your partner’s feelings into account, for example- don’t come naturally to him, and when we see him living alone in a trailer at the end of the movie, miles away from anyone or anywhere, with things all looking rather dismal and forlorn, this is in all possibility a habitat which he finds perfectly amenable. Maybe he is living some of the best years of his life out in that backwater with no-one to bother him, and has finally attained that mythical, ever-elusive privacy, albeit with some sacrifices.

Ultimately, this was a mature, accomplished work that achieved tasteful, understated levels of poetry and lyricism, eschewed easy answers and gave the viewer space to draw their own conclusions around its narrative content and tone. As with many other movies we’ve covered, The Tree of Life being the most recent example, there was a melancholic sadness forming a key aspect of Brokeback Mountain’s fabric. Any film that covers twenty years in its protagonists’ lives is apt to touch upon lost opportunity and wasted time; in this case, I particularly felt that the concept of ‘hauntology’ was relevant, a theory that, if I’m understanding it correctly, decrees that people are ‘haunted’ by lives they could have had, ones that are presumably better than the one they’ve got. Jack spends the film not so much haunted by a life that he could have had with Ennis as much as he’s haunted by one that he could currently be having, in the present tense. Instead he has to go back to his cold wife and his boorish nightmare of a father-in-law, probably feeling as if Ennis has somewhat sentenced him to such a thing. When he solemnly intones ‘I just can’t quit you’, the sentiment carries with it the suggestion that he would quite like to, prompting yet more questions as to whether this is really a ‘love story’ at all, or rather something more akin to W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and its tale of Philip Carey’s inexplicable, self-sabotaging capitulation to the abominable Mildred.