Special Reports from Cannes Film Festival
Thursday, May 18

Lunch with Michelle Yeoh, and other oddities


By JOHN HARKNESS

CANNES, FRANCE - There are two kinds of film critics. The optimist looks to the future and, despite all evidence to the contrary, sees endless possibilities. The pessimist looks at the past and develops impossible standards.
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Day Nine - After seven days of "art," I shuffle down the hill for Ang Lee's out-of-competition special Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which promises martial arts, Chow Yun Fat, Michelle Yeoh and lunch at the Carlton Beach with the stars, director, producer and 50 or so of their best friends in the North American press. OK, I admit it, I would have gone to the screening even without the promise of lunch.

A stunning film in the grand tradition of martial arts movies with amazing wire work from the principals - particularly Yeoh and her chief antagonist, Zhang Zi Yi - a great romantic seriousness and the kung fu tavern fight to end all kung fu tavern fights. All the stars I have available. Best movie I've seen at the Cannes festival this year. The folks at Sony Entertainment can do with that what they will.

Anyway, Michelle Yeoh comes into the Carlton Hotel's Beach Restaurant looking every inch (about 63 of them) the move star in an embroidered blue silk pants outfit. Ang Lee looks as if he should be bussing the tables. If the names are not entirely familiar, Michelle Yeoh was Jackie Chan's partner in crime fighting in Police Story III: Supercop and kicked some serious butt opposite James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies. Ang Lee is the Taiwanese-born, American-schooled director of The Ice Storm, Sense And Sensibility, Ride With The Devil and The Wedding Banquet.

They are effusive in their praise for one another. Yeoh compares the film, which is entirely in Mandarin, a language she doesn't speak, with playing Shakespeare. Lee calls Yeoh "the only actor who's ever made me cry while I was shooting a scene."

What's unusual is that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a top-notch action movie directed by a great actor's director who was smart enough to hire Yuen Woo-Ping - whose credits as a martial arts choreographer go all the way back the original Drunken Master movies and up to Jet Li's Fist Of Legend and The Matrix - to organize the film's unique fight scenes. Well, unique up to a point. "Fight scenes in martial arts movies are a pretty standard group of set pieces,"Lee notes dryly. "There's the one-on-one fight for the climaxes. There's a group fight, which is always a mess and doesn't really allow for great stunt work. Then there's the tavern fight, where the action doesn't have to match, so you can just let the star give a great bravura performance and take on as many opponents as the film can afford.

"The problem with most action movies is that, usually, really good actors can't move like that and action stars can't act." Which brings us to Yeoh and Chow-Yun Fat, strung up on wires and flying through the air. Yeoh, who tore her ACL during her first big action scene - she landed badly off a kick - and had to undergo surgery while the film shot around her, says the production decided to take full advantage of the fact that the wires can now be digitally erased from the film by using thicker wires, allowing the actors to do more elaborate stunts. "But because you feel more confident, you have to be more careful. Your timing has to be perfect, otherwise it looks terrible, and you can also injure yourself on your landings - you're running in the air and trying to catch the edges of rooftops. I've done a lot of wire work, and you can break your ankle." This is Lee's second big action movie, and he says that what he learned on his first, last year's underrated Ride With The Devil, is that even in an action movie the characters are everything. "When we were previewing Ride With The Devil, I realized that whenever the character got more than three feet from Toby (McGuire), people were bored."

Yeoh, for her part, learned that her director was a dogged perfectionist. "You do the fight scenes very fast, and you have to, and you have to show power when you punch or kick. If you do a series of six or seven punches, and the fifth and sixth punch were weak, he'd stop us and do it again. And the dialogue? Ang would call 'Cut' and say, 'Michelle, the third word of the fourth sentence, you really didn't stress the first syllable like you should.' I told him if he thought swinging the sword was so easy, he should try it."

(original from http://www.nowtoronto.com/special/cannes00/rep1.html)