Broken Parallelism: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon & the Hope of the Antithesis (Blossay)

Broken Parallelism: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon & the Hope of the Antithesis

By Maddy Rodak

Film Analysis: Cinematography and Gray Morality

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a film directed by Ang Lee, is set in 18th century Qing Dynasty China and follows the story of three main characters: Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), and Yu Jia Long (Zhang Ziyi). The film includes martial arts and sword fighting, and these elements play a large part in the plot. While the storyline revolves around revenge, power, and coming to terms with the past, the motivations of the female characters in the film have perhaps one of the largest parts in driving the plot forward. When Jia Long—a governor’s daughter who is set to get married—steals Mu Bai’s sword, named the Green Destiny, for Mu Bai’s sworn enemy Jade Fox, who is the woman who has helped Jia Long learn combat skills, the lives of these three main characters become tightly intertwined. As someone who has studied the Wudang manual and wishes to become a strong warrior, Jia Long is determined to do whatever she can to live a life according to her own will and avoid getting married and being a wife. Shu Lien, a long-time confidant of Mu Bai, determines to get the Green Destiny for Mu Bai since it is an incredibly powerful sword and she believes it does not belong in a thief’s hands.

Before discovering that Jia Long is the thief, Shu Lien befriends Jia Long and learns that the young woman wishes to be a warrior like herself. After discovering Jia Long’s secret, the two develop a tense relationship—which includes the fact that Shu Lien knows something about Jia Long that could ruin her career as a warrior—and leads to them fighting one another in a tense battle of skill. In a way, Shu Lien and Jia Long are one in the same, and yet complete opposites. They have both experienced love and heartbreak, have both trained to be exceptional warriors, and pushed their way out of societal norms to live the lives they want to live. However, while Shu Lien did this in a more applaudable, conventional way through working alongside warriors such as the legendary Li Mu Bai, Jia Long’s journey could be considered the exact inversion of this. Jia Long became a great warrior by working alongside Jade Fox, who is considered corrupt and a murderer by the likes of Li Mu Bai and others. While Mu Bai is a legend, Jade Fox is an outcast, and these two figures that these two women work alongside shape how they are viewed by not only the audience of the film, but also by the society in which they function within the film.

Throughout the film, the cinematography often sets the main characters slightly out of center in the frame. This can especially be seen when the characters are facing the camera head-on, and when they are addressing another character who stands off-camera. This off-balance framing of the characters shows the gray morality that they show across the length of the film. Jia Long is never fully a villain; she has her dreams and drives, and she displays a range of emotion that present her as a character with great feeling and humanity. Li Mu Bai may be a legend, but Jade Fox does not see him that way; he can also be considered the student of a man who took advantage of women like Jade Fox, women who wanted to train to be warriors but were barred from doing so due to their gender. Shu Lien’s conflict of good and bad comes from her romantic feelings for Mu Bai; if she admits her feelings for him, she feels like she is betraying her dead husband.

The film contains many close-ups of characters' faces. This can often be seen when the character who is in the frame is in contact with or speaking to another character. An example is the scene when Mu Bai and Shu Lien are talking, and Mu Bai rests his cheek on Shu Lien’s palm. Such close-ups show the emotion the characters are feeling; in showing the faces of these characters from such a distance, disrupting personal space, the emotions of each character are laid bare through their expressions. Even when Jia Long’s face is mostly covered when she is dressed up like a ninja, the close-up on her face allows for the emotion in her eyes to speak for how she is feeling in the moment: focused, strained, and a little terrified.

Also, the lighting of the film can feel somewhat artificial and thus fantastical at times, as can be seen when Jia Long is running around dressed like a ninja in the dark of night. The only real source of light can be from the moon, and the brightness would have to be incredibly strong. This sense of fantastical lighting also adds to the heightened emotion and palpable tension that ebbs and flows throughout the film. Along with this, slow motion is sometimes used within the fighting scenes of the film. Sometimes a characters’ movements are slowed down when wielding a sword, or their martial arts skills are slowed down in order to show off their skill. This is also something that adds to the rising tension of the scenes in which it is present. Often, these scenes are further accompanied by the cello music of Yo-Yo Ma, which greatly adds a dramatic effect.

Scene Analysis: Shu Lien, Jia Long, and The Importance of Skill

At the end of the film when Li Mu Bai is dying from being poisoned, Shu Lien has hope. She says, “Everything has an antithesis”. But in the end Mu Bai ends up dying anyway, and it is too late even though Jia Long has brought the anecdote. In this scene, Jia Long is Shu Lien's hope. This is ironic, because throughout the film Shu Lien can be considered as undermining Jia Long's talents and using her own skill to surpass the young warrior. However, this phrase: “Everything has an antithesis” can be seen as having more than one meaning. In a way, Jia Long is Shu Lien's antithesis. They are both skillful warriors, but both women have trained in different ways and want different things out of life.

The one scene that captures the tense dynamic between Shu Lien and Jia Long at its most complex and fervent is when they confront each other and fight one last time. 

The scene starts with a full shot, showing both of the main characters of the scene; it is a long shot, but one that is just long enough to show the surrounding building in which they stand. The two characters, Yu Shu Lien and Yu Jia Long stand facing one another in the middle of the shot, their faces turned to one another; their side profiles are what is visible to the viewer. The parallelism of these characters—in regards their characterizations and personalities, for instance—is also represented in the building and its construction: each side where the two characters stand is the exact same as the other’s side, down to the pattern of the wooden walls and the lanterns hanging from the ceiling. From this distance, the viewer can not get a sense of how the women are feeling or presenting themselves due to the distance between the camera and the characters. This distance and sense of not having an understand to the character emotions adds to the tension of the oncoming fight scene. Close-ups of the two women then continue the scene.

When the camera does a close-up on Yu Shu Lien’s face, there is a further zoom in that takes her weapon out of the frame. The focus of the shot becomes entirely of Shu Lien’s face, primarily her eyes, which move down as her gaze is focused at the Green Destiny that Yu Jia Long is currently wielding. The next shot is of the Green Destiny being held high in Jia Long’s grip; the camera moves down her arm and to her face as she stares back at Shu Lien. This shot can be considered motivated because it is paralleling Shu Lien’s gaze as it travelled from the Green Destiny to Jia Long’s face, as if she were taking in the weapon and the person using it and planning her proceeding form of action. In this opening part of the scene, there is never a focus on Shu Lien’s weapon, which appears to be a machete. The entire time when the weapon is shown in conjunction with Shu Lien the weapon is blurred out, and the only focus is on Shu Lien’s face and her movements, specifically the raising of her arm, which present her as calm, collected, and prepared to fight Jia Long. This emphasis on Shu Lien puts an emphasis on herself as a whole and on her ability of being a skilled fighter, rather than on the weapon of choice she wields in her fighting.

 

The same can not be said for Jia Long. Jia Long’s gaze wavers; she does not stare down Shu Lien confidently, but takes a quick glance at the Green Destiny, hinting that she feels a sense of unease or uncertainty in either her ability to win in a fight against Shu Lien or her worthiness of wielding such a legendary sword. Being considerably younger and thus less experienced than Shu Lien, Jia Long is probably aware in this scene that there is a chance that she will lose against Shu Lien, who happens to be one of the people Jia Long has looked up to the most and had wished to emulate through her martial arts training. In discussing characters and their the way they are initially shot and presented in a scene in his book, Film Studies: An Introduction, Ed Sikov writes, “Even at the basic level of a single shot, mise-en-scene yields meaning. The first shot of an important character is itself important in this regard” (Sikov 8). In this scene where Shu Lien confronts Jia Long and they fight one another, these first close-up shots of their faces set up the scene for its final result: even with the Green Destiny, Jia Long cannot defeat the well-trained and highly-experienced Shu Lien. In the end, the complete destruction of the table that stands at the very center of the two identical sides of the room in this scene mirrors the relationship of these two women: broken and unrepairable, despite how connected they may seem to each other.