Director Ang Lee is the only person to win Best Director Oscars for a foreign and domestic film.

Winning for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and more recently for Brokeback Mountain, you might think that these two films are, literally and figuratively, worlds apart.

But they have some profound similarities. Specifically, theyre love stories set against a backdrop of individual and social angst.

The first time you see Crouching Tiger you may overlook the love themes, because the swordplay is something special, and filmed beautifully.

My breath was taken away when, suddenly, the adversaries carried on their fight without the interference of gravity. Exchanging lunges and parries while in flight, they defy conventional physics and enter a world of aerial ballet.

If youre a literalist, and you want your martial arts sequences to appear realistic, youll probably be left behind and let down as the characters set themselves free of all earthly restraints.

Ang Lee is known for delivering beautiful cinematography, and Crouching Tigers is nothing less than poetic. Two martial arts masters, a man and woman, are doing everything they can do to check their burgeoning love for each other while pursuing evildoers.

But Lee places them, in one memorable scene, in a quiet retreat, where their chat is set against a backdrop of concrete that has a rectangular opening in it, through which one can see the verdant forest, nearly next to them, yet still at a safe, neatly determined distance.

As a visual metaphor for repressed love, the scene needs no words, and Lee is wise enough to know this, so there are few.

All we have to do, to enter the hearts of these masters is to see their open air prison, to follow their eyes and detect the creasing of their lips, to appreciate their discipline and foremost commitments to duty.

But because all of this is portrayed so beautifully, so lushly, theyre not to be pitied, but rather, to be admired.

Aristotle said pity is the emotion we feel when we witness a tragedy that we think cannot happen to us.

These martial arts masters remind us that for all of our purported strength as warriors, we are helpless under the spell of love, and hopeless without it.