The Grandmaster – Wong Kar-wai pulls his punches
3 / 5 stars

Wong Kar-wai’s strained story about Bruce Lee’s trainer lacks the emotional power of his best work

By Peter Bradshaw

Published on Thursday 4 December 2014 18.30 EST in The Guardian

Wong Kar-wai laboured for years on this weighty martial-arts movie that first appeared in a longer cut at last year’s Berlin film festival. It is by turns intriguing, exasperating, beguiling. The Grandmaster is a distinctive piece of work, a deeply felt homage to the art form of kung fu and the art form of movies about kung fu. But it also feels like a slightly self-conscious piece of ancestor-worship, straining against an inertia of its own making. The Grandmaster is not a masterpiece, and compared to the blazing and compelling emotional reality of Wong’s magnificent In the Mood for Love (2000), it looks artificial and slight. The film is an elaborate, stylised cine-ballet inspired by the life of Ip Man, master of the wing chun discipline of kung fu; born to a wealthy family in China, where he studied martial arts, he left for Hong Kong in the 50s due to his association with Chang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalists, and started a kung-fu school where he taught Bruce Lee.

The action begins with the retirement of the martial arts “grandmaster” from northern China, Gong Yutian (Qingxiang Wang), and the resulting succession debate brings into play the brilliant young fighter Ip Man (Tony Leung), a married man who is to fall in love with Gong’s beautiful daughter Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi). Their denied love affair is displaced into a fascinatingly eroticised kung fu contest, and they are parted by the Japanese invasion. The section of the film located in mainland China could be taking part in almost any century; in Hong Kong we are updated smartly to the 50s, interspersed with newsreel footage, and even a glimpse of a Princess Elizabeth poster for the coronation. There is great poignancy in their final meeting, and for a moment we glimpse something real, a memory of the romantic anguish of In the Mood for Love. As a film-maker, Wong appears to be retreating upriver into genre, style and mannerism. It is all managed very elegantly – but with a fraction of the power in his greatest work.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/04/the-grandmaster-review-wong-kar-wai

The Grandmaster - first look review
4 / 5 stars

Wong kar-wai's movie, which opens this year's Berlin film festival, is less Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and much more a study of ideas and textures

By Andrew Pulver

Published on Thursday 7 February 2013 19.59 EST in The Guardian

There's been quite a bit of radio silence from Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, right; since 2007, in fact, and his epically self-indulgent American-set road movie My Blueberry Nights.

Now he's back with, of all things a kung-fu movie: one that tells the story of Ip Man, the legendary martial artist who has a pop-culture claim to fame as one of Bruce Lee's teachers in the 1950s.

Wong, however, with his predilection for woozy atmospherics, riper-than-ripe visual tropes, and shimmering decorative surface, has delivered a far from conventional example of the genre. Ip Man has already been celebrated fairly recently by a couple of straight ahead biopics with Donnie Chen; all the more reason, perhaps, for Wong to be allowed to take his habitually oblique approach.

His Ip is played impassively – the point of rigor mortis, virtually – by Wong's regular collaborator Tony Leung, as a modest champion of "southern" martial artists against in their struggle for technical supremacy with the "northerners". Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang), a northerner, is the retiring grandmaster; he nominates Ip to take his place. Occupying at least as much screen time as Ip is Gong's daughter, Gong Er: this is the luminous Zhang Ziyi, who supplies the quivering, pulsating emotions conspicuously lacking in him.

In truth, though Ip Man and Gong Er have considerable fellow-feeling; their stories don't entwine all that much: such is the way of the historical period, savagely interrupted by invasion and war. There's an interesting contrast between the technical violence of the kung fu contests, which although showy and spectacular, don't seem to result in much in the way of crippling injury, and the gouts of deep scarlet blood associated with the cruelties of the Japanese occupation in the 1930s.

Leung's downbeat persona is also calibrated to carry Wong's particular take on the martial arts film: this is about philosophy and aesthetics as much as head-kicking. There's certainly plenty of action, orchestrated by fight-movie maestro Yuen Woo-ping, of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger renown, but Wong slathers it with applied stylistic devices: thundering rain, splintering glass, a buttery sepia colour wash and a rather odd repeated motif of sliding slippered feet. In fact, the presence of both Zhang and Yuen force a comparison – and underscore the difference – with Ang Lee's breakout martial arts hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's fair to say that The Grandmaster possesses nothing like the bounding, light-on-its-feet energy of Lee's film; Wong's film is much more a study of ideas and textures, designed to ravish the senses.

Nor can it compete with Lee's effortlessly mesmerising storytelling; Wong instead creates a delicate tracery of description, flashback and vignette that require a sizeable investment in concentration from the viewer.

The rewards, however, are considerable: the discipline of the genre seems to have channelled Wong's flair for image-making away from the self-involved blind alleys his last few films have taken him up. The Grandmaster is something pretty special.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/feb/08/the-grandmaster-review