Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Produced by Bill Kong, Hsu Li Kong and Ang Lee; directed by Ang Lee; written by James Schamus, Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung, based on the novel by Wang Du Lu; cinematography by Peter Pau; production and costume design by Tim Yip; edited by Tim Squyres; action choreographed by Vuen WoPing; music by Tan Dun. Color, Mandarin dialog with English subtitles, 119 mins. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

While Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is often hailed as a great leap forward from the swordplay films mass produced in Hong Kong in the Sixties and Seventies, in one respect it closely resembles its low-budget predecessors: its slipshod subtitles, which leave out or mistranslate significant portions of the Mandarin dialog. This lapse is surprising in a film otherwise so exquisitely attentive to esthetic detail. It is also unfortunate in that it further blunts the film's already murky and convoluted exploration of philosophical and psychological themes, allowing martial arts pyrotechnics to largely overshadow emotional impact.

The film depicts the intertwined romances of two pairs of lovers. Old friends Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), the head of a security company, and famous swordsman Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) have long shared an unspoken love, while the pampered aristocrat Yu Jiaolong (Zhang Ziyi), whose name means 'Winsome Dragon,' pines for the bandit chief Luo Xiaohu (Chang Chen), whose name is 'Little Tiger.' (That these Chinese names, which help to illuminate the significance of the film's title, are rendered uninformatively as "Jen" and "Lo," respectively, is but one minor example of the numerous infelicities committed by the subtitlers.) Li wishes to give away his sword, with its burden of death and enmities, and to retire to a peaceful life with Shu Lien. However, when the sword is stolen by Jiaolong, a.k.a. Jen, and when Li's old nemesis Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei) resurfaces as Jen's mentor and ally, Li is drawn irrevocably back into his old existence of violence and intrigue.

The film seems primarily concerned with suggesting the tragic impossibility of individual freedom, as epitomized by the characters' inability to achieve happiness through the fulfillment of romantic love. On the surface it seems that the external constraints of competing social obligations and bonds hamper the characters from pursuing their love. The film depicts a complicated social world in which political savvy and respect for hierarchy and convention are necessary for survival, and in which personal desires have little place. For example, Jen's father, newly transferred from a remote provincial posting to serve as a high official in Beijing, seeks to consolidate his position in the capital by betrothing Jen to the scion of a powerful political family, regardless of her wishes.

Such implacable social codes and hierarchies govern not only the political and cultural elite to which Jen belongs, but also the marginal, disreputable world of jianghu to which Li, Lo, and Shu Lien are linked. Jianghu, literally 'rivers and lakes,' is a term for the Robin Hood-esque underworld of chivalrous, wandering outlaws, which typically forms the backdrop for swordplay novels and films. While Jen wistfully imagines that jianghu offers freedom from constraints, the other three characters, for all their swashbuckling adventures, are portrayed as rigidly bound by traditional Confucian ideals of filiality, fidelity, chastity, and respect for teachers and elders. In a manner that may seem alien to Western audiences, each of these characters denies him or herself romantic fulfillment out of deference to such Confucian values. Shu Lien represses her love for Li out of fidelity to her dead fiance, while Lo encourages Jen to leave his desert lair to return to her parents out of empathy for their distress at her disappearance. Li Mu Bai puts off his romance with Shu Lien in order to fulfill his duty to his late teacher by avenging his death and to attempt to detach Jen from Jade Fox to become his own pupil.

Moreover, jianghu, while perhaps easy to enter, proves difficult to escape. Li finds it impossible to leave old scores unsettled and to relinquish his sense of mission as defender and transmitter of the teachings of his school of fighting, while Lo, determined to earn a place in legitimate society in order to win Jen, is dogged by his disreputable past. The film demystifies jianghu and paints it as tragically trapping its members in its insistent undertow, in contrast to the more idealized depictions of many earlier swordplay novels and films.

In addition to the external constraints imposed by the Confucian social code, the film poses another, perhaps ultimately more powerful, obstacle to the characters' realization of happiness through love: repressed or conflicting inner desires-or the "crouching tigers, hidden dragons" of the human psyche. The significance of the film's title, which is a Chinese idiom referring to hidden or unsuspected forces or powers, is glossed in a key line spoken by Li to Shu Lien as they pause at a teahouse in their pursuit of Jen and the stolen sword. "In jianghu there are crouching tigers and hidden dragons, just as there are in men's hearts. Blades and swords conceal evil, just as men's emotions do," he reflects, as he explains his failure to renounce his life of violence and intrigue as he had originally intended. This line is translated in the subtitles simply as, "Giang Hu [sic] is a world of dragons full of corruption," which inadequately conveys the original insight on how internal conflicts, unac knowledged desire s, and impulses for destruction and betrayal hamstring the characters' pursuit of the love and happiness they purport to want. Thus, even when social constraints are thrown off--as when Jen runs away from her bridegroom and parents, or when Li finally dares to clasp Shu Lien's hand--the happy union of the pairs of lovers fails to materialize.

The petulant and capricious Jen, who began to withhold secret martial arts techniques and her mastery of them from her teacher at age eight, is the character most obviously dogged by inner demons. After escaping from her nuptial chamber to the countryside, she uses her newfound freedom not to join her lover Lo, but instead to roam about picking fights and bad-mouthing Li, apparently victim to a poisonous combination of resentment and secret desire for him. Similarly, Li, apparently serene and transcendent in contrast to the impulsive and tempestuous Jen, is equally torn by internal conflicts. At the beginning of the film, Li has just abandoned his protracted quest for enlightenment in the midst of a key phase of meditation, thwarted by a matter of the heart which he leaves unspoken, presumably his love for Shu Lien. Soon after, however, he fails to fulfill his avowed intention of leaving jianghu to settle down with Shu Lien. Derailed from enlightenment by earthly love for Shu Lien, and again balked from love by the temptations of vengeance and mastering Jen, Li seems paralyzed by the conflicting impulses for spiritual transcendence, love, social responsibility, and carnal pleasure.

Providing a counterpoint to Jen's and Li's inner struggles is Lo's story of a young man whose wish that his ailing parents be cured is granted when he shows his sincerity by leaping off a cliff; Lo explains this miraculous occurrence by invoking the Chinese saying, "A true heart makes wishes come true." The story and saying may be understood as shedding a little light on the film's otherwise rather baffling tragic denouement. Incapable of fixing on a single wish wholeheartedly, Jen and Li bring misery on themselves and others.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's most basic problem may be its choice of the action genre to examine this fascinating but abstruse problem of the vagaries of the human heart. Essentially plot-driven, as most action films are, Crouching Tiger might have been aided by consistent characters with clear-cut motivations to provide momentum and coherence across the twists and leaps of its various narrative strands. Instead, the characters, especially Jen and Li, seem exasperatingly muddled. Nor do the performances generate much insight or sympathy for the characters' inner struggles. Chow is charismatic, but his air of serene nobility gives little indication of the internal turmoil from which he apparently suffers. Zhang's lightning fluctuations between childish vulnerability and waspish aggression suggest the throwing of a switch. Yeoh's performance, by contrast, more convincingly suggests the passion and inner conflict that may lurk behind a reserved exterior.

Even more problematic is the role of the fight scenes in the film's existential meditations. As dynamically as these scenes are choreographed, performed, and shot, they seem curiously static and without suspense. Frankly, one often doesn't know exactly why the characters are fighting (over a comb? over a sword?) and worse yet, may not even care who wins. Certainly the sense of urgency, of righteous fury, that fuels the best films of the action genre--whether a Hollywood Western or a Hong Kong martial-arts film--is notably absent. Rather, the film's fight sequences resemble the song and dance numbers in musical theater, as if harking back to the martial-arts films' roots in Chinese opera; they are expressive and enjoyable, but essentially unmotivated. By showing characters seizing weapons as readily as if they were merely bursting into song, Crouching Tiger fails to answer the question fundamentally posed by the action film: When and under what compulsion do good characters resort to violence? Treating fightin g as an esthetic divertissement rather than confronting its import for death and chaos, Crouching Tiger is an action movie that packs no punch.

Pauline Chen teaches Chinese literature, language and film at Oberlin University.