Zhang Ziyi

I’m not an expert on wuxia. However, I wonder how many people in it, like Zhang Ziyi and her two-time costar Michelle Yeoh, got their start not from martial arts but from dance. It’s not as though real-life martial arts involve flying around above the treetops or in rooms hung in gauzy curtains or similar. While there’s a lot of history to the genre—all I’m saying is you don’t expect to have to go back two thousand years to get a brief overview of a film movement—the stylized version of Chinese martial arts combat has become the primary face of it, as Jackie Chan’s comedic movies are the face of kung fu movies, or at least were when I was younger.

It’s astonishing to realize that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was only her third movie. And that she was 21 at the time. In fact, she was suggested to me years ago when I was first looking for someone to write about whose last name started with “Z” because I am a sad, sad completionist, and I couldn’t write about her in those days because in those days the rule was that you had to be at least as old as I am, and she is slightly over two years younger than I am. I was in college when the movie came out. Yes, her character is supposed to be young and inexperienced, but still.

And, yes, she then went from wuxia to Jackie Chan; in fact, she still didn’t really speak English and Chan had to translate the director’s instructions to her. I’m curious about that; she’s been in movies directed by people with at least four different native languages. On the one hand, that sort of thing makes it less than surprising that she had no problem playing a Japanese character, since she’s played a Japanese character in at least one Japanese movie. On the other hand, you have to wonder about how that kind of thing works on the set.

Now, don’t get me wrong; part of her appeal is that she is a beautiful woman. More, though, it is that she is astonishingly talented. That dance training definitely shows, when she’s doing wuxia. Maybe it’s weird that it’s most of what I’ve seen of her movies. But she always moves exactly the way she should given her character; with grace or hesitancy or haste or some combination thereof. Dancers do not always make great actors, but when the combination of talents is there, it brings a little something extra to every performance that’s worth mentioning.

In the US, she is Ziyi Zhang, because the US goes personal name first, family name last. She made the change because her publicist thought Americans would prefer it. Which, you know, her publicist probably wasn’t wrong. He thought it would give her more chances in American movies, which is probably also not wrong. However, she’s chosen not to do a lot of the movies she’s been offered because she finds the plots distasteful. It’s hard to blame her; the way she describes them, they sound terrible. She deserves better; one hopes that, if she does American film again, it will be because she’s found her own Everything Everywhere All at Once.