by Lynda Del Sasso
Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon.
China/Taiwan/US 2000
Cert. 12
Director: Ang Lee
Rating * * * *
In the Qing dynasty, China,
renowned warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) entrusts his ancient
sword, the Green Destiny, to female martial arts fighter Yu
Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) asking that she deliver it as a gift
to the revered Sir Te in Beijing. When the famous sword is
stolen, Li joins Yu in the capital to track down the thief.
Meanwhile, a beautiful young
aristocrat Jen (Zhang Ziyi) arrives with her servant (Cheng
Pei Pei). Jen is excited to meet the Wudan-school-trained Yu,
and is hiding a mysterious secret. While trying to find the
missing sword, Li comes across an old enemy Jade Fox, the
witch who killed his master, and he pursues her to avenge the
murder. Jen, an independent spirit, goes missing on the day of
her arranged marriage to a wealthy man, and it transpires that
Jade Fox, the sword and Jen are all linked.
Taiwanese director Ang Lee (The
Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm) has
accurately described this Chinese language film as "Sense
and Sensibility with martial arts". However this martial
arts spectacular, choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix)
also encompasses two romantic love stories, adventure, and
traditional Chinese fantasy.
Michelle Yeoh (Yu), former Bond
Girl and Asia's most popular female action star, makes a
superb heroine, and the airborne fighting scenes are surreal
and exhilarating. The film's title comes from an ancient
Chinese proverb used to characterise situations and places
where nothing is as it seems. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
is packed full of delightful surprises; the text might easily
be read as feminist, yet its traditional story is timeless and
the gravity-defying martial arts sequences are pure
21st-Century technology. A real gem of popular cinema.
www.crouchingtiger.com
Duke of York's from Jan 5
Requiem for A Dream
US 2000, Cert. 18
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Rating * * *
Overweight, middle-aged widow
Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) lives in Coney Island, NY,
spending most of her time watching TV. Galvanised by the
prospect of appearing on a TV game show, Sara starts on a
dangerous regimen to beautify herself for a national audience.
Meanwhile, her son Harry (Jared Leto) and his new girlfriend
Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly) have slowly begun to reveal
themselves to one another, with each looking to the other to
redeem years of isolation and pain. Their love forms a refuge
that shuts out the real world and allows them to dream of
future bliss. After Harry and his friend Tyrone launch
themselves as drug dealers, it all starts to go wrong. The
drug-taking escalates, the real world turns ugly, Harry and
Marion's romantic utopia crumbles and they quickly descend
into bickering, betrayal and despair. Clinging tenaciously to
misbegotten hopes, all four characters plunge deeper into
delusion and desperation until their dreams become nightmares.
Writer-director Darren
Aronofsky follows up his acclaimed feature debut, Pi, with
this adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1978 novel.
Like Pi, this film is most
remarkable for its original use of the visual medium. Various
techniques present a range of character points of view; split
screens, jump cuts, and fast motion sequences are all used,
sometimes to humorous effect. The director also applies a
technique he calls hip-hop montage, in which he distills the
process of drug-taking to a rapid succession of images set to
Clint Mansell's hypnotic techno/hip-hop score. "The
repetitive nature of the hip-hop montages hopefully captures
the obsessive nature of addiction," says Aronofsky. The
visually intense result gels well with the characters' journey
from dream to nightmare, and the weird mix of 70s and
present-day dialogue helps the audience identify with the
characters as they plummet towards despair. As you'd expect
from novelist Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn) the tale starts
off in heavy emotional territory and plumbs the depths of
bleak. If happy endings are your thing, this is perhaps one to
avoid, but if dark and gloomy appeals, Requiem For A Dream is
a fascinating, albeit rather shallow, vision of life.
Duke of York's from Jan 19
|
