(Wong Kar-Wai, 2012)
I get the feeling that Wong Kar-Wai could
take any story and turn it into a film about Tony Leung mooning around in
period Hong Kong, remembering the various women in his life.
That’s not a bad thing; somehow director
and star often seem capable of alchemy when they work together. But it doesn’t
always make for an entirely satisfying experience.
Take The Grandmaster, for instance. It is
Wong Kar-Wai’s first attempt at a martial arts film since Ashes of Time almost 20 years ago. That film is a bizarre, barely coherent clash between a
directors sensibility and the demands of a genre. The result is delirious,
beautiful and never entirely successful.
The Grandmasters is more accessible. It
tells a story, following a handful of “grandmasters” – expert practitioners of
different schools of Kung Fu – across a few decades in the early 20th
Century. They include Yip Man (Leung), Gong Er (Zhang Zhiyi) and"the Razor"(Chang Chen).
While other biopics have made much of how Ip Man resisted the Japanese, here
his life as a warrior and his importance as a symbol and cultural figure is
barely explored. The prologue features an extended and stunning battle between
him and dozens of men at night in the rain. While this fight scene – visceral,
beautiful and brilliantly choreographed – seems inspired by and then surpasses
the climax of The Matrix Revolutions, it is entirely lacking in context of
dramatic weight. It is unsurprising that this scene was used as a teaser for
the film, since it works just as well as a standalone scene. Indeed it is never
really explained who, when or why Ip was fighting those men.
Instead in the first act we alternate
between learning about the contentment of his domestic life and the political
strife in the Kung Fu community, where ageing masters try to settle upon
dynamic new leadership while spreading understanding of the different styles
across their immense country.
The narrative follows this pattern,
elliptically cutting between different lives, times and places. Ultimately it
focuses (but only to an extent) upon the relationship between Yip and Gong Er, whose
early fight functions as a sort of consummation of a love that is never really
acknowledged until it is too late.
There are problems with this approach. In
his other work, Wong invests the characters with such intensity and emotional
truth that when the romantic longing kicks in – as it always must – it feels
earned and powerful. Here it feels a little tacked on, as if he was attempting
to give a typical martial arts film some of his own personality with mixed
results. You can almost feel him straining hard to find some resonance in this
material, and the resulting thematic hollowness is the result. The way the
narrative flips – that fight between Yip and Gong functions almost as a passing
of the baton – makes it feel like two films stitched uncomfortably together.
But at least they’re two ravishingly
beautiful films: the whole thing looks unbelievably good. Phillipe Le Sourd's cinematography
is fabulous; and Wong chooses to shoot many of the fights indoors, ensuring that
a rich, chocolatey palette predominates, an unusual look for a wuxia.
His cast are superb; Leung as deep and
charismatic as ever, Zhiyi carrying much of the emotional weight and doing it
easily. Both excel in the terrific martial art sequences, which do achieve some
poetry amidst the flurries of lyrical physical action. Indeed, many directors
more generally associated with the genre could learn a great deal from how
these fight scenes are handled – always visually impressive, they never
sacrifice physical coherence of visceral impact.
But this feels like Wong Kar-Wai
compromised, trying to be something hes not. It is still lovely and full of
good things, but it never feels quite right.
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