Crouching Tiger, Hidden Meaning
That enigmatic ending - a minority report
Very much CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
2025 is the 25th anniversary of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’. The screening we went to this week was perhaps my fourth or fifth time viewing it - and, if I’m honest, the first time I fully paid attention to the plot alongside the film’s sumptuous visuals and enchanting magical realism - and as a result, felt like I understood what was happening from beginning to end.
You may disagree, if you read on, for it seems that not many observers share my view of the ambiguous ending. If it’s been twenty-five years since you last saw it, you might want a quick recap:
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There are five main characters. Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) are the slightly older martial arts masters who have never openly acknowledged their feelings for each other. At the beginning of the story, Mu Bai explains to Shu Lien that he is giving up his sword - the legendary ‘Green Destiny’ - and that he’s doing so in hope of spending his life with her. However, because he says this in the least direct way possible (“I didn't feel the bliss of enlightenment. Instead... I was surrounded by an endless sorrow.”) they go on in their unconsummated way for the rest of the picture.
Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) and ‘Dark Cloud’ Lo (Chang Chen) are almost opposite in that regard. Respectively, they are a young-lady-who’s-secretly-a-ninja* and a wilderness bandit. Rather than keeping their desires secret from each other, they launch into a passionate relationship within moments of his stealing her comb (albeit one the cuteness-of-whose-meet depends on our being okay with Stockholm syndrome playing a significant role). But, theirs is a not-unproblematic love that cannot withstand the pressures of society, because Jen is a princess of sorts and is expected to marry to suit her father’s business interests. Lo’s desert-pirate career does not do that.
The fifth main character is Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei), Mu Bai’s sworn nemesis and Jen’s governess. She’s bitter, and not without cause - she was excluded from the Wudan martial arts school simply for being a woman. She is proud of Jen as her student, but eventually realizes that Jen has been keeping her own secrets - her talent far surpasses what Jade Fox could teach her, partly because unlike Jen, Jade Fox can’t read the textbook.
All of this simmering tension comes to a head when, after numerous attempts to stop Jen acting like a superpowered brat and give him back his antique sword, Mu Bai takes a poisoned needle in the neck and is bound to die unless Jen can fetch the ingredients for the antidote, then make and administer the antidote in time - which, it turns out, she can’t.
Then at the end Jen jumps off a cliff. Not just any cliff, though, but Wudan Mountain, which we’ve heard about earlier in the story.
This is the final exchange between Jen and Lo before Jen jumps:
Jen: Do you remember the legend of the young man?
Lo: “A faithful heart makes wishes come true.”
Jen: Make a wish, Lo.
Lo: (closing his eyes) To be back in the desert, together again.
The question is: why does she jump? Let us say first of all that the notion that it is simply a suicidal leap is so cynical as to subvert the entire film. You can read it that way if you want, but it doesn’t fit with anything else going on. Is this a world where legends are true, or isn’t it? Is all the gravity-defying leaping metaphorical, too? Maybe Jen isn’t even a martial artist. Maybe she isn’t even a princess. Hey! Maybe this entire thing is made up and Zhang Ziyi is just an actor…
Leaving that pedestrian interpretation aside, as far as I can make out the consensus opinion on Jen’s jump is either, “it’s just a lovely mystery, don’t worry about it” or “Our hero has once again confounded society’s expectations and taken her own path, because she values freedom above all else, even love”. I like both of these readings, but to me they both seem to overlook (or deliberately ignore) an essential question, which is:
What is Jen’s wish?
There is surely no doubt that Jen makes a wish when she jumps. This is the whole context that the film presents the jump to us in. Earlier in the film, Lo tells Jen in reference to the mountain:
“We have a legend. Anyone who dares to jump from the mountain… God will grant his wish. Long ago, a young man’s parents were ill, so he jumped. He didn’t die. He wasn’t even hurt. He floated away, far away, never to return. He knew his wish had come true.”
So, the kind of freedom that Jen seems to earn from the jump (floating away, far away, never to return) is only half of what’s granted to her - the young man of the legend got that alongside his wish, not for the wish itself. And she hasn’t forgotten that the jump allows her to ask for a miracle - she specifically references it herself by asking Lo for his.
I don’t think, therefore, that it makes sense to say ‘Jen wishes for freedom’. That kind of ‘floating away’ freedom is a by-product of the wish. I also think that Jen’s idea of freedom expressed throughout the film is indeed the ‘free’, adventurous life that Lo wants for them; not the enlightenment that Mu Bai previously sought - and which, in any case, Mu Bai also ultimately rejected with his dying breath.
Another option then is that she asks Lo’s wish in order to grant it to him. But Lo’s wish seems materially possible and not to need miracles to achieve. They were living that way in the desert before. Why can’t they simply go and do that again, and save the mountain jump for a real miracle?
So - is there anything else Jen might wish for in this moment? To me, it seems that there’s one big, unresolved matter for Jen - one thing she regrets not having achieved in spite of her awe-inspiring mastery, and it chimes with the original wish of the ‘young man’ of Lo’s legend.
Shu Lien and Mu Bai are like parents to Jen. She respects them far more than she does her actual parents, even when she’s fighting and arguing with them - indeed their interactions feel precisely like the kind of rebellion loving parents suffer from teenagers, especially in the older characters’ perpetual forgiveness of Jen’s major transgressions.
When Jen fails to return with the antidote in time, it is her major failing of the story. Mu Bai is lost to Shu Lien and it’s Jen’s fault - not only for her inability to beat the clock, but also because it was her chosen ‘master’, Jade Fox, who shot the dart - and Jen was used as bait along the way. Indeed, if Jade Fox’s last words are to be believed, Mu Bai took a dart *meant* for Jen.
Shu Lien, Mu Bai’s chaste lover, then has an opportunity to avenge him immediately. With Jen kneeling contrite before her, Shu Lien swipes with the sword - but stops just short of her neck, ostentatiously sparing her. Jen owes Shu Lien her life.
But, tragically, of course, there is no way for Jen to repay her debt. The only thing that could possibly make up to Shu Lien for Jen’s actions throughout the story, would be for Mu Bai to be revived, and for Jen to somehow enable them to be together in the same way that Shu Lien has allowed she and Lo to be together. And that would be impossible.
It would take… some kind of miracle…
You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?
If Jen wishes not on her own behalf, but on that of her would-be mentors, then it not only echoes the core legend of the mountain (the young man jumping to heal his ailing parents), but also resolves something discordant in her character. There’s a feeling through the film that Jen’s abilities, including her ability to wield Mu Bai’s sword, are owed to some higher purpose. There is talk of her being ‘worthy’ of it and of her having a ‘true heart’. But her actions seem anything other than worthy - she steals Green Destiny and steals it again, using to fight the two of them and, for that matter, anyone else who crosses her path, all but destroying a drinking establishment along the way. Absent of the other characters’ regard for her, Jen would read as a villain.
But if she uses her jump to revive Mu Bai, then suddenly she is worthy of all of their respect, and of Green Destiny itself.
And what of Lo’s wish? Why does she ask him for it, right at the end, before jumping herself? This is generally taken as paradoxical, or even cruel.
But don’t they both know he can jump, too?
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I should add that I am not by any means seeking to suggest that this is the only reading of the film. The enigma of the ending is one of many beautiful things about this story, and in some ways I prefer the interpretations which see Jen as such a free spirit that even love, and the adventurous lifestyle she covets, cannot bind her. In particular it’s pleasing to think that Jen might choose a path that disregards the desires of the male characters in the movie, when much of the conflict in the narrative is rooted in the denial of women to make their own choices. (Jade Fox’s exclusion from Wudan training, Jen’s arranged marriage…) - however, as seductive as that notion is, I offer this as an alternative possibility that I think squares with her interests and the position she’s in at the moment when she jumps. I don’t think she’s forgotten about Mu Bai and Shu Lien, and I don’t think she wants to abandon Lo, either.
What do you think?
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*Jen is not, of course, in the right time and place to be a ninja, technically. But her superhuman abilities and secretive behaviour correspond to folklore about ninja, so I use the term rhetorically here.
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