B | Rival schools of kung fu vie for supremacy amidst the Japanese invasion of China and the Chinese civil war. Directed by Wong Kar-wai Starring Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi Review by Jon Kissel |
Wong Kar-wai, master of the slow-burn romance, can no longer ignore his Hong Kong roots in The Grandmaster, a film that surrounds Wong’s signature unrequited romances with the wire-fu style of Hong Kong action cinema. Sold as a biopic of Ip Man, the eventual trainer of Bruce Lee, The Grandmaster is only tangentially concerned with him, such that his children die off-screen. In Wong’s vision, Ip Man isn’t a complicated man, albeit one who makes the uncomplicated look incredible. Instead, Wong broadens his focus for a consideration of 20th century China and all the tumult it experienced during the first half of Ip Man’s life. The Grandmaster illuminates little of Ip Man, starting as it does at a point when he’s already an expert at Wing Chun kung fu. Its greater success is Wong’s technical perfection in the service of a national metaphor about collective destruction.
The Grandmaster quickly reveals its interests in the opening fight. Ip Man (Tony Leung) is standing off against a gang of interchangeable goons, for no discernible reason other than it looks amazing. Filmed in pouring rain with speed ramps and choreographed by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping, Ip Man dispatches foes while spinning rain off his wide-brimmed hat. Any moisture on his body is strictly weather-related, because this is a man who doesn’t sweat. This introduction takes place in a disconnected timeline from the rest of the film, and exists only because it can. The rest of the film has more detail about its protagonist, but not much. He’s a family man who’s separated from his family by the war with Japan and the Chinese civil war, and he’s essentially a kung fu academic thanks to being the son of a wealthy family before ultimately opening a school in quarantined Hong Kong. Not exactly earth-shaking stuff, and his most famous pupil doesn’t feature at all.
An actor as charismatic as Tony Leung isn’t one to get a movie stolen from him, but Ziyi Zhang rips it right out from under him. She co-stars as a fictional character and while she and Leung are of similar talents, her character is vastly more compelling than his. Her Gong Er, the daughter of another kung fu master, makes choices and forces action as opposed to Ip Man who is so placid as to be passive. Gong Er is so passionate that, of the film’s mythic characters, she’s the only one who drops her impassive mien, even for a second. After her father is killed by Japanese collaborator Ma San (Zhang Jin), Gong Er refuses to heed her father’s dying words about moving on and dedicates herself to revenge, destroying her marriage, her career, and her body in the process. Most cruelly, the kung fu style she so jealously defended dies with her, untaught to the next generation. This tragic arc is driven by Zhang, an actor who’s repeatedly worked with Leung but who never got the better of him as much as she does here.
As great as Zhang is and as reliable as Leung is, this is a director’s film first and then a cinematographer’s. Shot by Phillippe Le Sourd, The Grandmaster is stuffed with incredible frames and shots. The centerpiece train fight between Ma San and Gong Er is an all-timer as fog and smoke and breath fill the cold night air and the combatants battle each other in furs whose each strand is visible through crisp backlighting. Wong makes the different kung fu styles coherent and distinct, and films action without the rapid editing that renders so much modern action unwatchable.
A film with this much of a historical sweep doesn’t reach its credits without having something to say about its choice of setting, and The Grandmaster gets there with an oddly pacifist statement for a film about martial artists. The wars of the 20th century displace all the characters in the film, causing mass death and misery, and, for the purposes of a film about teachers, leads to the extinction of an entire school. That death of knowledge is treated as greater than the loss of Ip Man’s daughters, doubly so because it needlessly comes to pass thanks to Gong Er’s vengeance obsession. These kinds of reprisals run rampant in places where social order breaks down, only leading to further alienation and violence and extinction. Ip Man was also ill-served by the events of the period, but he put vengeance aside and lived, while Gong Er dies in an opium den. For them, peace and war are choices to be made, and though the culmination of Gong Er’s choice is an incredible scene, the film makes no compunction about which character chose wisely. History is littered with people who refused a loss of face and reaped their deaths when a good-faith compromise might’ve sufficed. The Grandmaster makes violence look incredible, but it knows its limits. B
An actor as charismatic as Tony Leung isn’t one to get a movie stolen from him, but Ziyi Zhang rips it right out from under him. She co-stars as a fictional character and while she and Leung are of similar talents, her character is vastly more compelling than his. Her Gong Er, the daughter of another kung fu master, makes choices and forces action as opposed to Ip Man who is so placid as to be passive. Gong Er is so passionate that, of the film’s mythic characters, she’s the only one who drops her impassive mien, even for a second. After her father is killed by Japanese collaborator Ma San (Zhang Jin), Gong Er refuses to heed her father’s dying words about moving on and dedicates herself to revenge, destroying her marriage, her career, and her body in the process. Most cruelly, the kung fu style she so jealously defended dies with her, untaught to the next generation. This tragic arc is driven by Zhang, an actor who’s repeatedly worked with Leung but who never got the better of him as much as she does here.
As great as Zhang is and as reliable as Leung is, this is a director’s film first and then a cinematographer’s. Shot by Phillippe Le Sourd, The Grandmaster is stuffed with incredible frames and shots. The centerpiece train fight between Ma San and Gong Er is an all-timer as fog and smoke and breath fill the cold night air and the combatants battle each other in furs whose each strand is visible through crisp backlighting. Wong makes the different kung fu styles coherent and distinct, and films action without the rapid editing that renders so much modern action unwatchable.
A film with this much of a historical sweep doesn’t reach its credits without having something to say about its choice of setting, and The Grandmaster gets there with an oddly pacifist statement for a film about martial artists. The wars of the 20th century displace all the characters in the film, causing mass death and misery, and, for the purposes of a film about teachers, leads to the extinction of an entire school. That death of knowledge is treated as greater than the loss of Ip Man’s daughters, doubly so because it needlessly comes to pass thanks to Gong Er’s vengeance obsession. These kinds of reprisals run rampant in places where social order breaks down, only leading to further alienation and violence and extinction. Ip Man was also ill-served by the events of the period, but he put vengeance aside and lived, while Gong Er dies in an opium den. For them, peace and war are choices to be made, and though the culmination of Gong Er’s choice is an incredible scene, the film makes no compunction about which character chose wisely. History is littered with people who refused a loss of face and reaped their deaths when a good-faith compromise might’ve sufficed. The Grandmaster makes violence look incredible, but it knows its limits. B
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