(Hong Kong/China, 108 min.)
Dir. Wong Kar Wai, Writ. Wong Kar Wai, Jingzhi Zou, Haofeng
Xu
Starring: Tony Leung, Ziyi Zhang.
 |
| Ziyi Zhang stars in The Grandmaster, an eOne Films release. |
There’s a new take on The
Magnificent Ambersons hitting art-house cinemas and suburban multiplexes
alike. It’s a Chinese remake starring superstar actors Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love; Lust, Caution) and Ziyi Zhang (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Memoirs of a Geisha) in a sumptuous
martial-arts epic about history, legacy, and family ties. Like the 1942 Orson
Welles original, Wong Kar Wai’s film is a gorgeously rendered and richly
detailed period piece. The big twist of The
Grandmaster, though, is that Wong didn’t base his film on Welles’s picture
or the Booth Tarkington novel at all. The
Grandmaster became The Magnificent
Ambersons 2 when it suffered in the editing room and became one of Harvey
Weinstein’s cinematic victims. What was one of the most-anticipated films of 2013 is now one of the year's biggest disappointments.
Clocking in over twenty minutes under the version that
premiered in Berlin and caused a sensation in its native China, The Weinstein Company
release of The Grandmaster just
doesn’t jive. It might not be as bad a studio hack job as the 88-minute cut of Ambersons, which reportedly lopped an
hour off Welles’s version, but The
Grandmaster—this version, anyways—shows that artistic vision truly needs
time to breathe.
Audiences who want the real deal will gladly sit through a
lengthy Wong Kar Wai film. There’s no need to go on appeasing people like the
Joe the Moviegoer who notoriously gave feedback at the test screening of Ambersons, saying, “People like to
laff [sic], not be bored to death.” It seems as if the team
behind the North American release of The
Grandmaster took a cue from Joe’s desire to laff and cut out all the
character development and left in all the Kung Fu. If the masses won’t
appreciate a compromised cut, it seems silly to withhold the complete package
from the film buffs who will. The Weinstein Company’s abbreviated take on The
Grandmaster seems like a no-win situation.
The Grandmaster, or something like it, is a
sweeping historical epic about Ip Man (Leung), master of the art of Wing Chun.
Alternatively, as the North American trailer submits, he’s the man who trained
Bruce Lee. (This fact appears as a post-script in The Grandmaster.) The
Grandmaster thus works like an origins story as Ip Man shares his
philosophy on martial arts and nationhood as the film chronicles his life from
the 1930s through the Second Sino-Japanese War and a myriad of trials, tests,
and allegiances between martial arts masters in China.
The scope and biographical nature of The
Grandmaster presumably demands some exposition for non-Asian audience, and the
film provides some appreciated title cards and whatnot before moving on to a
breathtakingly-shot fight sequence in the rain that follow’s Ip Man’s
introduction to his worldview. Much else in The Grandmaster moves fleetingly.
Secondary characters and historical milestones pass through the film at a pace
too rapid to grasp their narrative, historical, and thematic significance. The
first act of The Grandmaster seems like a mish-mash of perfectly composed, if
unrelated, scenes held together by some extended fight scenes. If only the
drama had been left intact as well.
There’s only one storyline in The Grandmaster that has any depth or
coherence. That’s the thread in which Ip Man meets Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang), the
daughter of the Wing Chun Grandmaster whom Ip Man succeeds. This story, a
romantic sub-plot of sorts, sees Gong Er sparring with Ip Man and using her
devotion to the martial arts—and the greater philosophy and discipline behind
them—to reclaim her family’s legacy as she swears revenge on Ma San, the man
who killed her father. Gong Er’s storyline unfolds at a pace that allows the
characters and themes to flourish. Played in one of Zhang’s characteristically
strong performances, The Grandmaster gives audiences a strong character with
which they can grasp the legacy behind the masters’ devotion to the martial
arts. The action sequences continue to be stunningly choreographed—a battle at
the rails of oncoming train is especially memorable—and the sumptuous, ethereal
realization of Wong’s style brings out the best in the material.
It’s not really clear, though, if Gong Er is
supposed to be the true heroine of The Grandmaster or if her storyline is
supposed to complement that of Ip Man. It feels as if one steps out of one
movie and walks into another one when the time ends on Gong Er’s story and The
Grandmaster turns its attention back to Ip Man. Gong Er’s section of the film
nevertheless provides a taste of the greatness that The Grandmaster never fully
achieves.
A Wong Kar Wai film is never really about
plot, though, so it’s not entirely fair to blame the disjointedness of The Grandmaster on a distributor’s
revision. (It certainly doesn’t help.) His style typically works with a less
conventional structure and evokes a sense of romantic nostalgia, or that
passion of the missed moment that comes to life in Wong’s other films—recall
the slow-mo noodle walk in In the Mood for Love. The final act of The Grandmaster, plus Gong Er’s story,
has the sensational visual poetry of a typical Wong Kar Wai film, but The Grandmaster almost feels like two
different movies.
The first half is intelligible and incoherent
as Wong’s beautiful aesthetics clash with the swift pace of the film. His signature
use of slow frame rate, languid camerawork, and varied film stock all look
great in the action sequences, but they don’t help with the abbreviated
character development and cheesecloth portrayal of history. To be fair, the action
choreography by Yuen Woo-ping (Crouching
Tiger, The Matrix) provides some
of the best action sequences in recent cinema and it looks twice as good as
most fight scenes do thanks to the impressive cinematography be Philippe Le
Sourd. The music by Nathaniel Méchaly and Shigeru Umbayashi is equally evocative,
and the efforts by the costumes and arts and crafts crew go unscathed.
The
Grandmaster is certainly a visual and technical marvel, but it’s not the
martial arts opera one expects to see after five years of production and an
enthusiastic premiere. To dislike a Wong Kar Wai film is one of the most
distressing feelings a film buff will ever have, so one hopes that The Grandmaster will appear in North
America in full force so that cinephiles can appreciate it to the fullest. There’s
a great film in The Grandmaster to be
sure, but like the surviving cut of The
Magnificent Ambersons, it just isn’t there for cinephiles to see.
Rating: ★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Grandmaster is currently playing in Ottawa at Empire Kanata and Silvercity Gloucester.
