Ang Lee as an Auteur of Passion, Love and Faith in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lust, Caution, Life of Pi

This paper takes Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lust, Caution (2007) and Life of Pi (2012) as its corpus and analyses representative scenes from the three films in order to examine how Lee, working within the framework of auteur theory, handles three thematic pairs, namely life and death, love and hate, and the conflict between human beings and nature, through plotting, mise-en-scene and characterisation. A close reading of the scenes shows that Lee consistently subordinates spectacle to aesthetic restraint and to the audience's own reflection, so that the formal choices of the films carry a personal vision instead of merely serving the plot. The paper further argues that Lee's authorship is defined less by a fixed visual signature than by a recurring concern with repressed emotion and with the fragility of belief, and that this concern is what unites the three works. It concludes that auteur theory remains a productive lens for Lee's cinema, provided that authorship is understood as a process of negotiation between personal conviction and the original literary sources.