 Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chen Chang
Director: Ang Lee
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: Li is a great warrior, famous throughout China for his adventurous life. He decides to give his powerful, ancient sword as a gift to an old friend of his, but soon the sword is stolen by a mysterious master of the martial arts. Now, it's up to Li to uncover the thief and return the weapon to its rightful owner. |
Crouching Tiger is a great film, although interestingly, despite seeming like a very Asian film to western eyes - particularly with it Mandarin-spoeaking characters and jumpy-about martial arts - many in Asia have said it's actually more American than Chinese. The film is still the highest grossing non-animated, foreign language movie ever. It was the non-English language film to break the $100 million barrier at the US box office, eventually taking over $213 million around the world. As I pointed out in the article about
Amelie, in the grand scheme of things, the fact the highest grossing live action foreign language film doesn’t even hit the top 350 highest grossing films ever is pretty pathetic, and just goes to show how difficult it is to get English-language audiences to go and watch foreign films.
It worth pointing out though (and I’m sure that I’ll go into more when we get to some Miyazaki films in the Movie-A-Day series), that some of the Japanese animated films of Hayao Miyazaki, such as Spirited Away, have actually outgrossed Crouching Tiger around the world, however they’ve made virtually nothing in either America or Britain, despite the fact they’ve been dubbed into English (and dubbing doesn’t matter as much with animation as it does with live action films). For example, Spirited Away made $264 million outside the US, becoming the first film to pass the $100 mark before it was released in the States, but when it got to America, it grossed the grand-total of $10 million, despite a Best Animated Oscar win. It really is difficult to get English language audiences to go and watch foreign films.
However one of the things I find particularly interesting about Crouching Tiger is the language problems that are invisible to English-language speakers, but caused problems with the movie’s release in Asia. Many Mandarin speakers criticised the film because of various different accents of the main actors, many of which sounded wrong to them, but were fine to us.
The problem came from the background of the cast. Chow Yun-Fat’s first language is Cantonese, and while he speaks Mandarin, he does so with what is very obviously a Cantonese accent. Michelle Yeoh was born in Malaysia and then moved to England when she was four, and so speaks Malay and English, but didn’t know much Mandarin. She had to learn her role in Crouching Tiger phonetically, but it was again apparent to native speakers that she wasn’t really comfortable with Mandarin.
Chan Chang meanwhile is Taiwanese, and kept that accent, while Zhang Ziyi, who was born in China, retained a Beijing accent rather than going with a more generic Mandarin accent. Michelle Yeoh defended this variety of accents in a December 28, 2000 interview with Cinescape. She argued that "My character lived outside of Beijing, and so I didn't have to do the Beijing accent... Provinces all have their very own strong accents. When we first started the movie, Cheng Pei Pei was going to have her accent, and Chang Zhen was going to have his accent, and this person would have that accent. And in the end nobody could understand what they were saying. Forget about us, even the crew from Beijing thought this was all weird".
However that is a bit of an odd defence, as it’s the equivalent of doing a posh British period drama and having supposedly English characters speaking with German, American or French accents. The result for Crouching Tiger is that while it was highly praised in the English-language world, it was criticised by many in China for the way the actors talked. Because of the criticism, apparently for some Asian markets a dubbed version was produced, but it was dubbed into standard Mandarin – even though that was the language it was made in – just to get around the problem with the accents.
Then again, Crouching Tiger is an unusual Chinese film, as unlike most, it was specifically made with a Western audience in mind. Of course Ang Lee had already had experience making movies in America. In fact for a director born in Taiwan, he did things completely backwards. He studied film in the US and made his first movie, Pushing Hands in America. So despite being known as an Asian director, Crouching Tiger was actually the first film he directed outside North America, and despite the wirework and plot, he brought a relatively western perspective to the way it was filmed. Likewise, although there were two Chinese screenwriters, Lee’s longtime writing collaborator James Schamus also worked on the script, ensuring it would work for Western markets (some in Asia said it wasn’t really a proper martial arts movie, because to them the way it worked seemed more American than Chinese).
It didn’t hurt either that it was part funded by Sony Pictures, who could give it a much more aggressive release than most foreign language films get in the West. It certainly worked, as not only did it become the highest grossing foreign language film ever, but also scored more Oscar nominations - 10 of them – than any other non-English language film. However it did that by truly being a fusion of East and West, and to many in China, the balance seemed more weighted towards the West than East, while of course to non-Mandarin speakers it seemed to opposite.
TIM ISAAC
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