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In Crouching Tiger, that motion has its own poetry, for these semi-gods and demi-devils possess a buoyancy to match their gravity. The film's first action scene, with Shulien chasing the sword's thief (who, we soon learn, is Jen), sets the tone and the rules. The two fight hand-to-hand and foot-to-foot. Jen suddenly floats up, as if on the helium of her young arrogance, and canters up and down the courtyard walls as if they were velvet carpets, with Shulien in urgent pursuit.
Everywhere in the world--in Asia, during the film's original commercial run, and at the Cannes, Toronto and New York City film festivals--audiences have had the same response to Crouching Tiger--rapture. They gasped with glee as Jen and Jade Fox soar into the night. They misted up at the friendship of Mubai and Shulien, two brave warriors who haven't quite the courage to say I love you. They happily took the film's 20-minute detour to the Gobi, where Jen meets her bandit beau Lo (Chang). At the end, they sobbed farewell to an old warrior who gives a lovely valediction.
The movie has its roots in Asian action movies of around 30 years ago. It quotes famous fight scenes from two films by the action master King Hu: Come Drink with Me, in which the young, fierce Cheng Peipei defeats an inn full of martial studs, and A Touch of Zen, with two knights doing battle in a grove of bamboo trees. Lee had the inspired--or crackpot--idea of staging the fight between Mubai and Jen on the trees' branches, 60 ft. in the air. "I'd fantasized about this since boyhood," Lee says, "but a lot of my ideas weren't feasible or didn't look good. Nobody, including Yuen, wanted to do the tree scene, for a simple reason: it's almost impossible. The first three days of shooting were a complete waste. There were 20 or 30 guys below the actors trying to make them float. It was just chaotic." Finally it worked--a scene so buoyant that the audience soars along with the stars.
Lee is a visionary and a perfectionist; he demands more than his colleagues can freely give. For the dapper, amiable Chow--Hong Kong cinema's top tough guy before he became Jodie Foster's regal pupil in Anna and the King--the experience was often "awful. The first day I had to do 28 takes just because of the language. That's never happened before in my life." Lee drove Yeoh, whose family's language is English, nearly to tears with his insistence on precise speech. But the beautiful action star thinks it was worth the trouble. "I've been waiting 15 years to work with this guy," she says. "He's gentle and very emotional. During a sad scene at the end of the film, he kept telling me to do different things, and when he'd come over I'd see he was red-eyed, teary. He gets so completely involved. And when he says, 'Good take' after a shot, he really means it."