The Grandmaster

The Grandmaster is Hong Kong based director Wong Kar-wai's latest film in years.  This US release is 108-minute short, compared to the 130-minute premiered in China and the 123-minute played in the Berlin film festival.  This release has added on-screen explanatory texts, voice-overs and chronological story editing to help the stupid and attention deficit American audience understand the film.  It's hard to ignore the back story of the movie:  Tony Leung broke every bone preparing and pretending to fight,  Wong spent fifty years researching the movie, twenty years shooting haphazardly, ten contemplating and flip-flopping between a singular or a plural English title, and yet another ten on cutting, pasting and rearranging footage into something that resembles a film.  Of course, in the process, miles of footage were left on the cutting room floor, egos were bruised.  The back story takes on a life itself and completely overshadows the actual movie.

When the flag drops the bull shit stops.

The Grandmaster is a distillation of Wong's lyrical style of film making, beautifully and unapologetically rendered from cinematography, wardrobe, sound, music to of course the beautiful actors.  Kung-fu saves Yip Man, the title character, literally and spiritually, carries him through tumultuous times.  The film is peppered with pithy aphorisms.  Yip says kung-fu is just two words: horizontal and vertical, in the end, the one lies horizontal loses, the vertical one standing wins and he is the right one.  This is simplistic to a fault and almost offensive to boil down kung fu to street fighting level.  Or not?  Given the chance to be a collaborator during the Sino-Japanese war, he chooses to endure hardships rather than joining the Japanese.  Yip is pragmatic that if he fights he wants and needs to win.  He later flees Futshan to Hong Kong.  Not exactly heroic but sure pragmatic.  Yip was born to a very well-to-do family, he thinks it's only fair for him, in his forties, to experience hardship and starvation like most everybody else during wartime.  His twin daughters are later starved to death.  The Grandmaster is about kung-fu as much as Casablanca is about WWII.  Kung-fu is an integral part but there is more:  Wong's perennial theme of unrequited and unconsummated love.  Yip is a married man when he first meets Gong Er, played by Zhang Ziyi, the daughter of a kung-fu master from the North.  Gong Er is a master in her own right and her relationship with Yip is really love at first fight.  Gong tries to avenge the honor of her family by fighting Yip.  The fight, set indoor, more like a mating dance, is at once mesmerizing and borderline cheesy.  Wong Kar-wai just couldn't help himself having his slo-mo and close-up shots of the fine boned Zhang.  (Who could anyway?  Ang Lee couldn't either.)  Yip and Gong don't meet again until years later in Hong Kong but only to say fair well.  In between bad things happen to good people.  Gong Er's father is killed by his lead disciple Ma San and to avenge his death, Gong Er vows never get married or having any disciples in front of the Buddha (if she succeeds avenging the death of her father).  Be careful what you wish for.  Gong Er kills Ma though not without seriously getting hurt, which later leads to her opium addiction and ultimate demise.  At some point, Gong Er's house servant urges her to abandon her vow to Buddha as she is in Hong Kong, leading a brand new life in a brand new world, nobody knows any vow, implicitly suggesting her to be with Yip.  Gong, always strong willed, refuses because "heaven knows, earth knows."  She lives and dies by her own code of honor.  The tea house farewell between her and Yip is achingly beautiful and Zhang gives a knockout performance quietly but equally powerful like any kick she delivers, right to the heart of the audience.  Yip lives the life of kung-fu, the last man standing, vertical.

If style is the substance, is there no style over substance?  In this day and age, anything goes nothing matters, people pee, poop in public, disregard etiquette, manner even humanity among each other, it is refreshing and heartening to see a film that takes its style seriously and be reminded that once upon a time there are Chinese people who live honorable lives.