Wong Kar-Wai eulogizes a martial arts legend in gorgeous The Grandmaster Slashes of Time

by Jim Ridley

Published in Nashville Scene

The Grandmaster

PG-13, 108 Min. Opens Friday at The Belcourt

ong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster is an opera in which the arias are delivered in kicks, flips and close strikes. It has the exhilarating athleticism that makes people lifelong fans of martial-arts movies, but the fights bring us inside the characters' heads — the performers spar with the liquid quickness of thought, belief and passion expressed through action. Despite its grounding in the hidebound biopic genre, it's unmistakably its maker's movie — a historical pageant splintered by time and loss into gorgeous, madly romantic fragments, each bearing the intense pang of its passage into memory.

Wong's biography of Ip Man, the Chinese master whose disciple Bruce Lee would carry his Wing Chun teachings to a vast Western audience, is epic in scale yet intimate in gesture and effect. At this point, I should say I've only seen the 123-minute cut of The Grandmaster that was prepared for the Berlin film festival, not the 108-minute version prepared by Wong for U.S. audiences — the one distributed by The Weinstein Company and opening Friday at The Belcourt. Judging from interviews Wong has given stateside, and comparisons online by a number of critics (including Glenn Kenny and Robert Koehler), this shortened version is substantially different. It not only deletes material from earlier cuts — there are at least three versions, the first of which reportedly ran four hours — but adds historical exposition and new scenes.

Opinions vary on whether this director-approved shorter version is an equally valid reworking (much like the 2008 "remix" Wong made of his 1994 wuxia epic Ashes of Time). Some find it a desecration; others prefer it. Based on the version I saw, however, I can't imagine any cut of The Grandmaster being less than visually overwhelming. It's a movie, like Bertolucci's The Conformist or Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, that makes the movies surrounding it look starved of style and emotion.

Take the opening: Torrential rain pounds a gated alley in a film-noir cityscape, as shadowy thugs encircle a lone man. He tenses, braced for onslaught, as languid slo-mo raindrops plop like depth charges. Faceless adversaries fall, downed by close kicks and punches that send bodies flying; movements register in impressionistic shards, as when the lone defender's sweeping maneuvers send water pinwheeling from the brim of his Panama hat.

Once again, the man at the center of the director's whorls of motion and light is the great actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who can look Bogart suave or Jack Webb lumpen playing a wronged husband or aggrieved lover — sometimes both, as in Wong's In the Mood for Love or here. We won't find out who's fighting and why until later, and by that point the battle will already be consigned to the past. What matters is that the lone man remains standing: Ip Man, a figure already celebrated in a string of successful Hong Kong films starring Donnie Yen that went into production during Wong's development delays.

By Wong's standards, what follows is unusually straightforward, at least chronologically. The future martial-arts master grows up, gets married, lives the first 40 years of his life in what he terms a perpetual spring. When the master of the Northern Chinese Gong clan announces that he wants to face a successor who represents the Southern martial-arts traditions — over the protests of his daughter Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) — the ranking Southern masters put up Ip as their candidate, in a title match with the region's honor at stake.

These early scenes, as Ip prepares by facing a succession of Southern masters — each demonstrating his or her specialty as if transmitting nuggets of folklore — recall the formal training sequences in genre classics such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. They benefit from the tutelage of a modern-day master: the fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping (The Matrix, the Kill Bill movies), who provides what amounts to a cram session in the various fighting techniques. These matter because they're the distillation of entire traditions, and we feel the weight of their threatened loss in the film's second half, as years of war, starvation and personal tragedy leave the hero humbled and alone.

And yet the characters can be as much prisoners of their legacies as inheritors — the fate of Zhang's Gong Er, who eventually sacrifices her future to preserve her family's honor, setting off a string of bitter ironies. From the moment she and Ip test one another's skill, in a beautifully staged gravity-suspending fight that's more a reticent erotic pas de deux than deadly combat, they become familiar figures in Wong's firmament: orbiting stars just out of alignment, doomed to circle one another without connecting. Zhang summons some of the bratty impudence she showed as the upstart princess in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but she assumes a tragic weariness here; the director and cinematographer Philippe De Sourd light her like a movie goddess from an earlier era — another frozen image in a movie whose repeated motif is of people trying to suspend history and memory in posed photographs.

The many people who turned out for The Belcourt's recent Wednesday-night screenings of Wong's movies will recognize signature flourishes throughout The Grandmaster — the exquisite slow motion, a character fixed in the frame while the rest of the world passes in a blur. But they're not affectations he affixes to a stolid prestige-movie framework, like Christmas tinsel on a maple. Wong's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels juxtaposed their crazy swirls of color and motion with dispassionate voiceover recounting what had already happened; his sensibility uniquely suits a movie about the weight of what is gone. His fight scenes, cut fast but legibly by his invaluable editor-slash-production/costume designer William Chang, sometimes pause to reflect on some stray sensual detail — the slosh of fighters' feet in water, garments swishing a floor as their wearers bob and weave. The movie is shot through with scraps of memory: near misses and lost loves, blows and triumphs, all slowed down, extended and nursed in retrospect, the way you can't help tonguing a toothache. To paraphrase critic Peter Brunette, Wong's style, rich as it is, doesn't obscure meaning in his movies — it is the meaning.

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