Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

With Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Taiwanese director Ang Lee adapted the fourth book of Wang Dulu's Crane Iron series and brought wuxia, the Chinese martial chivalry genre, to a worldwide audience. Screened out of competition at Cannes in May 2000, it gathers actors from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan around a thwarted love story and a stolen sword.

Yuen Woo-ping on the fights

The action was choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, the Hong Kong director behind Jackie Chan's early hits and the fights in The Matrix (1999). Shooting the fights took around 80% of the production schedule, even though they fill only a quarter of the running time. The actors did most of their own stunts on wires, with up to three hundred cables used for the duel on top of the bamboo forest. Characters run across rooftops and over water: that comes from qinggong, the "lightness skill" of wuxia novels, not from realism.

What a practitioner will notice

Beneath the flying, the movement is grounded in Chinese martial arts. Handling of the jian, the straight double-edged sword, is central, and Michelle Yeoh, trained in dance before becoming a Hong Kong action star, switches between traditional weapons in one famous duel, including the broadsword, spear and hook swords. The film also refers to the Wudang mountains, home of a Taoist tradition of internal arts. Cheng Pei-pei, the star of King Hu's Come Drink with Me (1966), links the film to the genre's golden age.

A global hit

The film grossed more than 213 million dollars worldwide, including 128 million in the United States and Canada, a record for a foreign-language film in that market. It won four Academy Awards in 2001, including Best Foreign Language Film. Critics praised the fight scenes, though some found the quieter stretches slow. In mainland China and Hong Kong the response was cooler, partly because of the lead actors' accents.

If you train in kung fu or wushu, you will see the range of Chinese weapons and styles serving a story, with a level of choreographic rigour rarely seen in Western cinema at the time.