'Grandmaster' is a meditative martial-arts movie

By Joe Williams

Published on August 29, 2013 in St. Louis Post Dispatch

China’s melting pot is Hong Kong, the peninsula and surrounding islands on the southeast corner of the Asian continent where the British reaped raw materials and peddled opium for much of the modern era. Even under the new handover treaty, Hong Kong culture remains a mix of East and West, with filmmakers such as Wong Kar Wai (“In the Mood for Love”) adding Continental romanticism to Chinese rationalism.

Wong’s beautiful if fettered film “The Grandmaster” reflects a similar schism in the martial arts, as acrobatic northern kung fu is Confucian in its rules while pugilistic southern kung fu is more violent.

In the pre-Maoist period, an emissary from the north named Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang) comes to the city of Foshan to unite the two traditions by finding the greatest fighter south of the Yangtze river. In an elegant brothel, his henchmen test the mettle of the regional champions until they meet the master of the “wing chun” style, Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu Wai of “Hero” and “In the Mood for Love” — not to be confused with fellow heartthrob Tony Leung Ka Fai, who filmed “The Gua Sha Treatment” in St. Louis circa 2000).

With his reactive fighting style, the humble Ip Man impresses Gong Yutian but angers his hotheaded apprentice, Ma San (Zhang Jin), and intrigues his beautiful, talented daughter, Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), who is forbidden to inherit her father’s academy.

Because Ip Man is married and the father of two children, his smoldering attraction to Gong Er becomes dust in the winds of war, as the Japanese invasion of China blows them in different directions. She fights for family honor in Beijing, where Ma San betrays Gong Yutian by collaborating with the invaders, while Ip Man finds himself trapped across the border in Hong Kong, where he ekes out a living as one of many martial-arts instructors. When they are finally reunited, the spinning world has worn one of them down.

It’s a rite of passage for an acclaimed Chinese director to make a martial-arts movie, but while Zhang Yimou in “Hero” and expat Ang Lee in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” gave us high-flying fights with color-coded combatants, Wong gives us shallow focus, slo-mo battles with muted tones in snow and rain. And instead of dwelling in the imperial past, he connects the story to the present with a coda about Ip Man’s most famous pupil.

Whereas many kung-fu movies are a feast that leaves us weary with sensations, the tastefully bittersweet “Grandmaster” puts us in the mood for more.

What “The Grandmaster” • Three stars out of four • Rating PG-13 • Run time 1:48 • Content Martial-arts violence, brief drug use and strong language • Language Chinese with subtitles • Where Tivoli

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