Your typical Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner usually has a very limited number of people flying through the air having swordfights. But then, “typical” is something Ang Lee’s CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000) was never destined to be.

This entry from Taiwan is the rare foreign-language film that was supremely popular with both Academy voters and the moviegoing public. Nominated for ten Academy Awards and winning four, the film grossed over $128 million at the U.S. box office. Not bad for an action film whose main use of CGI was removing the wires from the wirework.

Then again, calling CROUCHING TIGER “an action film” would be like calling THE GODFATHER “a gangster movie:” It is, of course, but it’s also much more. Described by Lee as belonging to the fantasy-martial arts genre, CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON reaches operatic proportions.  After all, the film didn’t earn Oscars for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Original Score (and nominations for Costume Design and Original Song) for nothing.

Also nominated for Best Picture, Director, Film Editing, and Adapted Screenplay, the movie does touch on themes familiar to fans of such fare: honor, mastery, vengeance, destiny, and—the actual heartbeat of the movie—love not acted upon.

These broad strokes are all well served by the details. Lee researched the elements of the film’s visual design from weaponry to calligraphy. But he did not insist that the costumes be bound by historical fact. To Lee, giving costume designer Tim Yip more latitude would help the movie become more of what it was at heart: a fantasy, a musical by other means—with all the emotion and theatricality that implies.

Of course, for many viewers at the time, the images that stood out were the stunts performed by the cast, which includes international stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. Elegant battles take the characters from the ground to the rooftops to the treetops. Staged by master martial arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping, the fight sequences make CROUCHING TIGER’s world one in which gravity is but a guideline and there are no laws of physics. At least none that the characters cannot bend.

But what makes CROUCHING TIGER unique is that its capacity to astonish outweighs its need to astonish. Just consider it next to another movie that was often mentioned in the same breath (or at least the same reviews): THE MATRIX. It stands to reason that they would be. Both were choreographed by Yuen, and it was THE MATRIX that introduced Yuen’s choreography to a broader audience stateside.

THE MATRIX, which won the previous year’s Academy Award for Visual Effects, opens with an action sequence. In fact, before the film even hits the two-minute mark, it has used its heroine to dispatch four cops and debut its signature “bullet-time” technique. (It’s ironic how a film that keeps asking us to open our eyes also tries so early and so often to blow them out of their sockets.)

Ang Lee paces his epic differently. Once the film begins, fifteen expositional minutes pass before any of our warriors get it on. And when they do, Lee ensures that they walk before they fly. The stunt work starts out small—a few exaggerated steps—before building to an aerobatic chase where feet leave the floor for the wall. And the wall for the open air.

No, CROUCHING TIGER takes its time. And nowhere is that better crystallized than in Michelle Yeoh’s performance. Especially the quiet moments that find her in close-up. During these dramatic interludes or the almost-but-not-quite-love-scenes, Yeoh’s stillness makes her as compelling to watch as she is during the elaborate sequences when she is in motion. And toward the movie’s end, when Yeoh crosses the few inches between her and her character’s gravely injured would-be love, the movement is as fluid and arresting as the ones that make up those incredible fights. If this is a movie (and a genre) preoccupied with mastery—over your weaponry, over your body, over your desires—then Yeoh has it. Over the camera.

The camera is the translator. It translates the characters’ thoughts into our own emotions. It translates their movement into fight sequences that are uncommonly graceful. (That are uncommon, period.) And it translates a screenplay written in Mandarin into a language that isn’t based on language at all.

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