Is it a bird, a plane, or a super-kungfu-master? In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, based on part four of a five-part novel by early twentieth-century writer Wang Du Lu, kungfu fighting is raised to new heights — literally. The fighters jump up tall buildings with a few simple bounds and even fight in the treetops. Just why they fight at all, rather than negotiate, is a mystery that the director, Ang Lee, presumably wants filmviewers to solve. The title is a Chinese phrase referring to a place where mysterious or unsuspected powers lurk. With English subtitles, the film was made on the China mainland. The time period is the Qing dynasty. When the movie begins, Li Mui Bai (played by Chow Yun Fat) wants to abandon the craft of kungfu, so he decides to surrender his 400-year-old sword to Sir Le (played by Lung Si Hung), his kungfu master, though his longtime kungfu companion Yu Shu Lien (played by Michelle Yeoh), head of the Yuan Security Compound, tries at first to dissuade him but then agrees to return the sword to Sir Le for him. When the sword, known as the Green Destiny, is stolen by a masked intruder, Li pledges to recover the sword. The intruder, however, is Yu Jen (played by Zhang Zi Yi), who is betrothed to a fat nerd. Having been trained for a decade in the art of kungfu by Li’s evil archenemy Jade Fox (played by Cheng Pei Pei), Jen does not want to marry, so she takes the sword, heads west for Wudan Mountains after stealing away from the wedding procession. On the journey, she vanquishes various male challengers, and ultimately meets Dark Cloud (played by Chang Chen), who takes her comb. Dark Cloud, aka Lo, is the leader of a Manchu outlaw gang. In an effort to retrieve the comb, she follows Dark Cloud, but he takes her captive. Similar to the plot in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (1990), she falls in love with her captor. However, he urges her to return to the palace after the two enjoy sex together, as he can only offer a life on the run. Upon returning home, she realizes that she can live only with Dark Cloud, so she again travels west, tussles with Li and Yu for possession of the sword, but Jade Fox delivers a fatal poison needle to Li’s neck. Before dying, Li confesses that he has always loved Yu, but he never dared to say so before, in order not to dishonor the memory of Yu’s husband, who died in battle years earlier. When Jen reaches Dark Cloud, who is now in charge of a palace of his own, she decides to commit suicide. The director, Ang Lee, whose paternal grandparents were executed by the Communists because they were landowners, clearly is eager for us to learn something about China or Chinese culture. First, we see that conflicts are resolved by stealth and by force, never by negotiation. Second, women are subordinate, even when talented; but there is a further nuance, as the Chinese character for “swordsmanship” is also the character that means “ultimate woman.” Third, honor is more important than either success or enjoyment, so sexual repression is sublimated into kungfu mastery. Does Ang Lee want us to understand that his native Taiwan does not want to become subordinated to the People’s Republic of China and might even prefer an honorable bloodbath to an ignominious surrender? Some of the symbolism might lead to such an inference, but censors in Beijing did not see any such message. MH