Zhang Ziyi makes defiance exciting without making it admirable by default. We rate her highly for the physical precision, but higher still for the impatience, vanity and humour she brings to Jen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Fi1m perspective
In Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Zhang Ziyi lets Jen’s impatience show before we have decided whether to approve of her. Her desire for freedom is persuasive, but so is her capacity to make things difficult through vanity and unruliness. We laughed at her inability to conceal her impatience, and liked that Zhang did not ask us to excuse it. Zhang trusts us to stay interested when Jen is being difficult.
Her feature debut was Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home (1999), before Lee’s film brought international recognition. Further work with Zhang in Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004) accompanied a Hollywood career that included the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). Wong Kar-wai gave her Bai Ling in 2046 (2004) and Gong Er in The Grandmaster (2013). Preparing for Gong Er took three years, a reminder of how seriously she approaches the physical demands of a role. Her dance background helps explain the precision, though it would be a poor account of her acting to stop there.
Lee gives her the right conditions, taking Jen’s desire for freedom seriously without requiring us to endorse everything she does. Wang Huiling, Tsai Kuo-Jung and James Schamus’s screenplay lets its women be forceful and emotionally confused without treating them as problems to be corrected. Zhang makes good use of that freedom: skill in combat never settles the question of whether Jen’s behaviour deserves admiration. We value the director’s willingness to leave those difficulties in place. Roles offering Zhang only competence and composure would waste much of what makes her worth watching.
A few slow stretches in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are the small caveat to our enthusiasm. Its humour and feeling still justify recommending it well beyond martial-arts regulars, and Zhang is a substantial reason for that. Start there, and watch her impatience as carefully as her fighting.
Biography
Zhang Ziyi is a Chinese actress. She trained at the Beijing Dance Academy and graduated from the Central Academy of Drama.
Her first major film role was in The Road Home (1999). She gained international recognition for playing Jen in Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).
She has appeared in Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and The Grandmaster (2013), the last of which brought her twelve Best Actress awards.
