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.
