KNOCKING DOWN THE WALL LEE REVEALS A GLIMPSE OF CHINESE TRADITION.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

It is, Ang Lee says, ``an abstract idea of China for all of us, something that we're all associated with culturally. It may not even be real, but it is so genuinely true for the Chinese.''

The director is speaking of ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' his widely acclaimed Mandarin language film that, on the surface, resembles hundreds of historical Chinese action epics.

But upon closer inspection, the film could only have been made from the cinematic perspectives of today, harmoniously combining as it does the greatest strengths of the three contemporary Chinese film industries: Hong Kong's gravity-defying martial arts acrobatics, the communist mainland's classically precise visual aesthetics and the fine attention to modern psychology that distinguishes the movies of Lee's homeland, Taiwan.

And then there are the Western story-telling values that an expatriate like Lee - whose last three films were the Jane Austen adaptation ``Sense and Sensibility,'' the '70s suburbia-set ``Ice Storm'' and the Civil War epic ``Ride With the Devil'' - brings to the table.

It is perhaps that last quality that has encouraged Sony Classics Pictures, the art house arm of the entertainment conglomerate, to hope that``Crouching Tiger,'' after an initial limited release, will find a wide audience in America. And though hardly as huge here as they are in Asia, the toplined stars, Chow Yun Fat and Michelle Yeoh, have some name recognition, he for last year's remake of ``Anna and the King'' and such throwaway action fare as ``The Replacement Killers,'' she for being the most formidable of the franchise's Bond girls in ``Tomorrow Never Dies.''

So far, the movie is living up to the resounding film festival buzz that has been building since May. Already a big hit in Asia, it opened in New York and Toronto last week to a shattering $41,450.00 per-screen box office average. And some major critics have already declared ``Crouching Tiger'' the best film of the year.

So what is it, exactly, that makes this film stand out from the flying swordfighter crowd?

``I honestly believe that this is how we should do the genre of films, where the martial arts don't overwhelm beautiful story telling and very complex emotions,'' says Yeoh, the most popular action actress in Asia and, by extension, the world. ``Often, what happens with this genre is that you follow a standard formula where the action is more important than the story. In Hong Kong, story is just an afterthought that gets you to the next action sequence, whereas what Ang has done is really bring a beautiful sense of harmony and balance between the drama and and the visuals.''

Indeed, rather than opening with a breathtaking action sequence, Lee and his screenwriters - longtime producing partner James Schamus along with Wang Hui Ling and Tsai Kuo Jung, adapting a portion of Wang Du Lu's pre-war serial novel - begin quietly, setting up the relationships between expert warriors Li Mu Bai (Chow) and Yu Shu Lien (Yeoh), and the cultural parameters of some 300 years ago that shaped them.

He's one of the master swordsmen of the era, but like an Old West gunfighter who's tired of being challenged, Li Mu Bai is preparing to retire to a life of meditation. His longtime friend Shu Lien runs a security service inherited from her father. She and Li share a longstanding love that neither has dared speak of; although they can flash weaponry at the speed of light, run up vertical walls at 90-degree angles and sail through the air from rooftop to treetop, these superb athletes, though totally unrestrained by physical laws, are inescapably bound by the behavioral codes of their day.

``The opening sequences gently guide you into another world of another century,'' Yeoh observes. ``And then, when we burst into the first action sequence and started flying, you were in our world, you didn't go, 'Why?' By then, you accept the fact that these few, gifted people have trained for years to be able to defy gravity.''

Over the course of a fairly typical tale of revenge, deception and a repeatedly stolen magic sword, we meet a younger pair who are ruled more by their passions than by social conventions. Jen Yu (played by Zhang Ziyi, a 21-year-old Beijing dance and theater student) is a provincial governor's daughter about to be married into a noble family. Having secretly studied martial arts for years, she is in love with a desert bandit, Lo (Taiwanese actor Chang Chen). She is also under the influence of Li's mortal enemy, Jade Fox (Cheng Pei Pei, Hong Kong's first superstar action actress).

Befriended by the older couple, impulsive Jen triggers a complex series of alliances, betrayals, rebellions and revelations, played out againsteye- popping ballets of personal combat that are enhanced by swooping wire work overseen by the incomparable Yuen Wo-Ping, the Hong Kong martial arts master who made Jackie Chan a star and was also responsible for ``The Matrix's'' groundbreaking fight sequences.

``It's 'Sense and Sensibility' for me,'' Lee explains, ``with the action pretty much designed as the extension of each person's character.''

And as that description indicates, the movie's main focus is on the two female leads. While this is hardly a new wrinkle in Chinese cinema - Yeoh herself has participated in chopsocky ``Charlie's Angels'' flicks such as ``Heroic Trio,'' and the mainland's top filmmakers Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have built many a masterpiece around the riveting radiance of actress Gong Li - ``Crouching Tiger'' brings a new kind of feminine consciousness to the martial arts mode.

``I suspect that, in a male-dominated genre like this, women get parts that are men's fantasies,'' Lee reckons. ``Even when they're tough, they fight like men and, often, use male stunt doubles. Rarely do these films take the emotional route and really see them, how they fight and behave like a woman, so you can actually care about them. I fell in love with this book because it had that element. I like those characters; they speak to me more than macho guys or wimpy women.''

This was, of course, an opportunity Yeoh relished. And as the only one of the four leads with previous martial arts training, she seemed more than ready to tackle the task. But while Chow - whose international tough guy image is built upon the hyper-ballistic gunplay of John Woo's contemporary crime thrillers - and the younger actors had to learn plenty of new moves, Yeoh had a much more daunting dramatic task: speaking in the native tongue she didn't understand.

Raised in Malaysia and educated in Britain, Yeoh's first languages are English and Malay. She did not even speak the local Cantonese dialect when she began appearing in Hong Kong movies. Still unable to read Chinese, Yeohhad to learn ``Crouching Tiger's'' tricky Mandarin dialogue phonetically.

``That was very, very challenging,'' she understates. ``You couldn't just memorize it, because when you walked onto the set it had to come out sounding natural. And the character is so different from me; I'm very animated when I talk, and she is very zen-like. I didn't know when to pause, and it is the rhythm of the speech that gives the emotional backup to what she is saying. And once you change any inflection, in Mandarin, it changes the meaning of the whole word.

``So I was so self-conscious about all of these things,'' Yeoh adds, sighing. ``It was ... fun.''

To add injury to insecurity, it was action veteran Yeoh who suffered the production's one serious injury.

``Obviously, we always try to be very careful,'' she says, ``but I was not even doing a big stunt, just one of those jumping kicks that I would do 50 times a day. It's just different elements, y'know? The ground could have been uneven, there was a stone in the way, I kicked him where he was not supposed to block me or something like that. Anyway, the next thing I knew I was on the ground and couldn't get up, and I was devastated.''

Yeoh was flown to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for emergency knee surgery, followed by intense physical therapy. She was back working on dramatic scenes in Beijing within two weeks, but Lee nonetheless had to re-arrange the film's shooting schedule, which took the mostly Hong Kong crew across the width and breadth of China. While other scenes were being shot in the northern Gobi Desert or atop a swaying bamboo forest in the far south, Yeoh recovered enough to shoot her final showdown with young Zhang - a breathtaking face-off as athletically intense as any of the actress' pre-injury action scenes.

In his own subtle, low-key way, Lee has performed no less heroic a task: making a film informed by all the Chinas of the 21st Century, as well as those that have gone before and incorporating visions of a China that could yet be.

``My ambition was to connect with the past and go where nobody has been to yet,'' he explains. But perhaps the key ingredient to ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's'' exhilarating and moving frisson was Lee's need, as world cinema's premiere artist without borders, to find his own place in the cultural context from which he sprang.

``This made me come face to face with my own questions,'' he says. ``Where does life go for me? Where does filmmaking go for me? I was humbled by the experience of starting fresh in a whole different kind of film form. I may have been a big shot in Hollywood, but I was a novice to this kind of thing.

``But while everything was totally new, it was also a homecoming,'' Lee notes. ``It reassured me I'm a Chinese filmmaker. I just need to taste that at times.''

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5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Year of the `Dragon'

Director Ang Lee has created a masterpiece of love and martial arts

(2 -- 3) Beijing's Zhang Ziyi, above, plays Jen Yu, a governor's daughter about to be married in Ang Lee's ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.'' Left, Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen, right, as the desert bandit she loves in the sweeping romantic action movie opening today.

(4) Director Ang Lee says he was a novice at the complex action and romance combination in ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.''

(5) Zhang Ziyi's Jen brings a new kind of feminine consciousness to the martial arts film in ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.''