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Arts & Entertainment Preview - December 2000 B Y   E L L A   T A Y L O R Out of Africa Glover and Bassett    Written in 1969, during the full poisonous flower of South Africa's racist regime, Athol Fugard's play Boesman and Lena ought to feel more dated than it does, now that apartheid is over. But much of South Africa today faces the worst legacy of institutional oppression—the turning of the oppressed against each other. Directed by the American filmmaker John Berry (who died, at eighty-two, just before post-production work was completed), the film adaptation of Fugard's play features exceptionally strong performances by Danny Glover and Angela Bassett as a mixed-race couple smoked out of their shantytown by whites and forced—not for the first time—to take to the road. Cobbling together a home on a patch of muddy ground that stands in bleak contrast to the stately beauty of the mountains surrounding Cape Town, the two bicker endlessly. The drink-sodden Boesman, a study in despair, heaps scorn on the garrulous Lena, who constantly searches for the meaning of their downfall. The arrival of a frail, nearly wordless old Xhosa tribesman brings out both Lena's instinctive generosity and her partner's frustrated rage until the old man's death effects a small but crucial change in the couple's relationship. Bringing a play, especially a talky three-hander, to the screen is always risky business, but the actors' passionate performances, together with Berry's sparing use of flashbacks to suggest better days (and worse), make Boesman and Lena an emotionally powerful event. The Art of the Fight    Michelle Yeoh (mid-flip)    and Zhang Ziyi Perhaps because he grew up on both Western pop movies and Hong Kong action pictures, the Taiwanese director Ang Lee can experiment with Hollywood narrative (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm) without abandoning the Asian culture (The Wedding Banquet) that shaped him. His new film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which uses the Hong Kong action genre to tell a classic Chinese story, may be one of the most soulful martial-arts movies ever made. Certainly it's the most feminist: of the film's many graceful fight scenes, the most exquisite is a sword battle between two women, played by the Asian action star Michelle Yeoh and newcomer Zhang Ziyi. Shot in China, the subtitled film stars the Hong Kong idol Chow Yun Fat as a warrior knight who, on the verge of retirement, becomes enmeshed in the search for his stolen sword. Though it's stoked with enough intrigue, romance, and special effects (a gorgeous chase scene takes place in the treetops) to satisfy distributors on both sides of the Pacific, Crouching Tiger is also a meditation on Chinese traditions in which the fight is less an expression of uncontrolled aggression than a form of discipline, and a language communicating wisdom, pleasure, and even courtship. With a stirring score that includes cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma and with a script at once formal and puckishly vernacular, Crouching Tiger is a rare cinematic experience, both thrilling and strangely restful. A Performance to Die For A bloodthirsty Willem Dafoe    The celebrated director F.W. Murnau, who with Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst pioneered German expressionist cinema, is best known in the United States for his vampire film, Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Like many artists, Murnau was obsessed with the border between the real and the unreal and, according to E. Elias Merhige's impish new film about the making of Nosferatu, prepared to do almost anything in the name of authenticity. The conceit of Shadow of the Vampire is that Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), the actor hired to play the menacing Count Orlock, is in fact a vampire, and Murnau (played by a quietly reptilian John Malkovich) has promised him the neck of the leading lady (Catherine McCormack) after the film is completed. If the film is completed: once shooting starts, Schreck begins dispatching half the cast and crew. Most vampire movies turn on disease metaphors (in recent years, for AIDS), but Merhige wittily presents Schreck as an insanely literal Method actor who appears only at night, in character. Dafoe gives a performance so deliciously insidious and funny—flexing his long nails and sniffing over potential victims—that an Oscar nomination is likely for him (and for his makeup artist). The evocation of the dark naturalistic beauty of Murnau's filmmaking is masterly, but Merhige's prankishness, however amusing in this fanciful imagining of the first snuff movie ever made, also has the unfortunate effect of reducing a genius of German cinema to a caricature of the mad artist. Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly. Go to ... Photo Credits—Boesman and Lena: Kino International. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Chan Kam Chuen. Shadow of the Vampire: Jean-Paul Kieffer. Copyright © 2000 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.