Mixed Martial Arts: on The Grandmaster
What strange beast is this? Cantonese auteur and arthouse cinema darling Wong Kar Wai’s long-awaited martial arts epic, The Grandmaster made its first bow at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, and still bearing the visible scars of an infamous Weinstein pruning, it finally receives a general release in the UK. Twenty minutes lighter than the film that Hong Kong audiences were treated to, and under half the length of a much whispered-of four hour original cut, what remains is a fascinating and flawed work that feels like an abridgment of something far more ambitious and sweeping — and with all the grandeur and folly those words can imply.
Tony Leung plays Ip Man, the Kung-Fu master who became famous for training Bruce Lee in the art of Wing Chun. Here we meet him earlier in life, in a downpour on a grey-toned street, dressed in a long black coat and white hat. He takes on, and duly dispatches, all comers in an electrifying display of his chosen discipline. Gloriously kinetic, the action manages to merge the exquisite elegance of form, with the bone-crunching force behind each movement. Wong’s principles for bringing such sequences to the screen are in turn, what provides the film with its coursing lifeblood. For every extreme close-up of rainwater being flung from the rim of his hat, or droplets splashing into puddles, there is the impact of a fist or foot from which the audience feels a reverberating power. Even when assailants are hurled unlikely distances, they never seem weightless in the way they can in something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Ang Lee’s film is also far more typical of the genre, and while The Grandmaster is still a wuxia, it is stridently inflected with Wong’s authorial trademarks; melancholic yearning, shuddering slow motion, richly saturated visuals, and of course Leung. He plays Ip with a transcendent inner tranquility, borne of a film desiring to explore not combat so much as tradition, philosophy, and the historical practices and pressures that provide texture to such stories.
After the opening sortie, the focus shifts to the Northern grandmaster, Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang) visiting the South. He has heard of an impressive young proponent of Wing Chun whom he wishes to test before his retirement. This leads to much contemplation from the various fighters of the Southern region, seeking to impart their own wisdom and technique to their champion. Ip demonstrates his prowess time and again, not only with his physical ability but equally his mind.
Casting this tale against the backdrop of the Second World War, and conflict with Japan, Wong roots his hero (and martial arts) against the raging tumult of social upheaval. Discussed in an uncharacteristically talkative Ip Man voiceover rather than shown, these tantalizing connections are kept at arms length, a mode of storytelling that like much of The Grandmaster, only adds to the abiding impression that a great deal is missing from the full picture. That absence is forcibly felt in a central unconsummated relationship between Ip and Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), the overlooked, but no less adept, daughter of Gong Yutian. Zhang is as fierce and ravishing as ever in the role; a woman capable of replicating her father’s greatness if only convention would allow. The feelings suggested between her and Ip are unconvincing, apparently taking their hold — like Achilles and Penthesilea — during a skirmish, and never quite warranting the import they are imbued with.
In the post-war years, the action shifts over to Er almost entirely, and her desire to take revenge on the young man who dishonoured her father. It gives Zhang the chance to excel in the film’s most impressive scene; a railway platform standoff carrying an emotional weight that has otherwise been lacking.
Sumptuous, ornate, visceral, and elegant, yet somehow stilted, The Grandmaster is both muddled and refined. Its seams are evident, but the cloth they bind is exquisite. It combines all of Wong’s grace and reserve with wonderfully orchestrated action, but falls narratively on its face. At one point, Ip claims that Kung-Fu is about two words: Vertical and horizontal. Stay upright and you win. It’s hard to argue that The Grandmaster isn’t stood irresistibly and frustratingly aslant.
This review was originally published on the now defunct Vérité Film Magazine blog for the film’s UK cinema release in December 2014.