Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) kicks butt and breaks heats as a rebellious noblewoman in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Taiwan-born director Ang Lee is the most versatile filmmaker working in world cinema today. His range is astonishing. He began his career making personal films about his native country (Eat Drink Man Woman) and about the immigrant experience of Chinese Americans as they relate both to their new country and to family members left behind (Pushing Hands and the absolutely wonderful The Wedding Banquet). Then suddenly, he directed Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and after that, James Schamus’ adaptation of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, a contemporary tale of Anglo suburbia. We might note the common thread in all these films of the way familial devotion sometimes seems at odds with romantic yearning. But that’s a thread we won’t find nearly so prominent in Lee’s current release, the exquisitely beautiful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

  Lee grew up watching kung-fu films produced by the Hong Kong martial arts masters, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a tribute to the Asian action films that excited and fascinated him as a youngster. Set in some unidentifiable Chinese past, the current picture contains striking references to Arthurian legend and the American Western. The story centers around a 400-year-old sword with magical powers. Throughout his life, a melancholy warrior named Li Mu Bai (Chow-Yun Fat), has wielded the ancient blade called Green Destiny (the Excalibur of Asian myth), and with it has slain hundreds of enemy swordsmen. In middle age, however, Li wants to put his sword aside, yearns to turn away from the hard life of the warrior and perhaps, before too late, make clear his love for a fellow warrior, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). To that end, Li gives Green Destiny to an old friend, Sir Te (Sihung Lung) but almost immediately the sword is stolen by a thief in the night.

  Li and Yu suspect the handiwork of the evil Jade Fox (Pei-pei Cheng), but in fact the sword has been pilfered by one of her disciples, the nimble young noblewoman Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi). Jen is a troubled rebel, barely out of her adolescence, and she’s determined not to be forced into a marriage arranged by her parents. She steals the sword partly as a prank; the film suggests she may possess more serious reasons, but they never become clear. The efforts by Li and Yu to retrieve the sword provide the opportunity for stunning set pieces of combat. Chinese action directors have been staging scenes of such frenetic martial fancy for decades, but none have ever exceeded the ones here. Utilizing veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s aerobatic techniques that dazzled us in the otherwise forgettable The Matrix, the fight scenes here are thrilling. The actors dodge missiles coming at them from a hundred different directions, run up walls, dash across rooftops, and fly over plummeting caverns. In the movie’s most memorable sequence, Li and Jen scamper like squirrels into the willowy branches of tall trees where they continue to do battle as they sway under their own weight. The fight scenes defy human logic but succeed magnificently as ballet that can only be made in the movies.

  Sadly, the film’s core story doesn’t satisfy us nearly as much as its gorgeous visuals and kinetic action. Unlike Lee’s other films, this one fails to yield to thematic analysis. The film’s end struggles to suggest that even a nobly violent life is inferior to one infused with love and sharing, but not much that precedes it leads to this conclusion. Li is seldom as serene as when he is fighting. It is not even easy to deduce what, exactly, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is about. The film would seem at first to focus on the urgency of middle-aged lovers to savor finally what they have so long postponed. But Jen steals the movie’s center as surely as she steals the hero’s sword. And she remains a frustratingly elusive character.

  Are we supposed to like Jen? Are we, as do Li and Yu, supposed to see Jen as immature but redeemable? If so, the filmmakers have shorted us on reasons to believe that goodness resides inside her as surely as fickle ugliness resides in her actions. What does Jen want with Green Destiny? Does she truly admire Yu? What has been the nature of her long involvement with Jade Fox, a vicious killer and a cruel deceiver?

  Most of all, what are we to make of her relationship with Lo (Chen Chang), the desert bandit with whom she has a tempestuous affair? Jen meets Lo when he raids a caravan in which Jen and her family are traveling, and the whole long flashback plays like a parody of an American Western, Lo the handsome Indian brave and Jen the proper Eastern schoolgirl with a surprising stubborn streak. I kept thinking of some unmade B oater with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. You rob me. I chase you. You scorn me. I defy you. You love me. I catch you. You need me. I leave you. The young lovers’ tender scenes together in the desert suggest that their attachment is genuine. His clearly is, but how do we explain her reaction when he finally makes his way to her in the city?

  In sum, I am concerned that the most emotionally powerful moment is vested in the villain’s sense of betrayal by the one person she dared love. But why does Jade Fox bother to trust Jen? And what are Jen’s feelings about her mentor? Moreover, why does the film fail to produce comparable moments of emotional grip with its hero and heroine? In the end, what are we to take away from the twice-visited aphorism that "A faithful heart makes dreams come true"? The film delivers this sentiment as if we are to embrace it but then provides details that seem to give it lie. Call me perplexed.