The Grandmaster

I go weak at the knees at the mention of Wong Kar-wai. A Pavlovian reaction that has its roots in wonderfully beautiful, melancholic films like Happy Together and In the Mood for Love. The Hong Kong romantic, aesthete, and perfectionist spent an age putting the finishing touches to The Grandmaster. But it has not turned out to be the masterpiece one would expect from this great master. Could it be that he has taken the stylisation, the perfecting of his style, too far? Is The Grandmaster quite simply too beautiful, too polished, too perfect, and, as a consequence, too unreal? We will come back to those questions another day. This film struggles, above all, with a problem of identity. It aims to be too many things at the same time. On the one hand, Wong Kar-wai is fascinated by the story of Ip Man’s life. Not because he was the kung fu master who trained Bruce Lee, but because of his extraordinary personality and his tragic life, on which China’s history left its mark. It is more a story of a downfall than of a rise. At the same time, Wong Kar-wai wants to do more than just present a series of virtuoso kung fu scenes. He wants to let us see beyond the acrobatic fights. Kung fu as a mental exercise. Kung fu as a collective term for various styles, each with its own history and culture, each straddling past and present in its own distinctive way. Alongside the Wing Chun of Ip Man (Tony Leung), we see the Ba Gua of Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), the Ba Ji of Razor (Chang Chen), and the Xingyi of Ma San (Zhang Jin).

The original title of the film, accordingly, was Grandmasters, in the plural. And it gets even more complicated: Wong Kar-wai throws his own favourite story into the mix too: the tale of the beloved who, for various reasons, cannot strike while the iron is hot and has to learn to live with the resulting melancholy. That angle, too, delivers some breathtaking scenes, but too much to chew is too much to chew.

The Grandmaster ●●
CN, 2012, dir.: Wong Kar-wai, act.: Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, 115 min.