The Grandmaster (15.)
Directed by Wong Kar Wai.
Starring Tony Leong, Zhang Ziyi, Wang Qingxiang, Zhang Jin and Song Hye Kyo. In chinese with subtitles. 108 mins.
During the last World Cup the BBC ran the complete season of FIFA World Cup films, the official records of the tournaments. A highlights package of a World Cup shouldn't be too taxing to put together but, FIFA being FIFA, almost every one was a maddening and infuriating experience. Practically everything was in slow motion; the goals were badly edited and shot from such obtuse angles you couldn't really enjoy them; they kept cutting to extraneous details that weren't important and trying to fit events into some kind of arbitrary narrative that was of FIFA's imagining. Watching it you could almost imagine Football's governing body had no understanding of the game.
Still could be worse: if Wong Kar Wai made a FIFA World Cup film, not only would it have all these flaws, and to an accentuated and unprecedented degree, but every match would take place in torrential rain or a snowstorm and he'd stick a tale of thwarted love into it.
After such grand yet muted romances as In The Mood For Love and 2146, Grandmaster is a tentative (second) venture into the world of martial arts, with another telling of the oft told tale of Ip Man (Leong), who's been the subject of more biopics than Stephen Hawking. He was one of the great Kung Fu masters of the previous century though his international fame is based on him tutoring Bruce Lee. Usually martial movies are associated with movement and energetic editing. In WKW's hands they are much more stately affair – Slouching Tiger, Hidden Action Sequences. Here, the practice of Kung Fu resembles the work of a stage magician and its various moves are pieces of misdirection – an arm shots out there, cut, a body swivels, cut, and then as if by magic his opponent is flying through the air towards a glass window. Ip Man stands there with his arm outstretched and his palm facing upwards, totally unruffled while the audience wonder how on earth he did that, he didn't even move? You wonder if its all done by mirrors but it can't be because he keeps propelling opponents into them.
Grandmaster is lavish and sumptuous, sprawling like Dr Zhivago yet modest and intimate like a chamber piece; a compressed epic. It is also barely coherent, particularly in the truncated version released here. For a film about a discipline that needs intense focus, it never establishes which is tree and which is wood.
As an action film it's ludicrous, but as a Wong Kar Wai film it has merit. Only Tony Leong could convincingly play a passive Kung Fu master, one who seems to be a helpless bystander in his own fight scene. (I was less convinced by Zhang Ziyi as his thwarted love interest: she has reached a stage where her attempts at being aloof and unattainable come across as everything being too much bother for her.) It also looks incredible. He may have finally parted ways with Christopher Doyle and the palette is a little more muted than in his classic films, but with his new DP Philippe Le Sourd he stills seems to have use of colour palette 2.0, an upgrade that nobody else has as yet been given access to.
Directed by Wong Kar Wai.
Starring Tony Leong, Zhang Ziyi, Wang Qingxiang, Zhang Jin and Song Hye Kyo. In chinese with subtitles. 108 mins.
During the last World Cup the BBC ran the complete season of FIFA World Cup films, the official records of the tournaments. A highlights package of a World Cup shouldn't be too taxing to put together but, FIFA being FIFA, almost every one was a maddening and infuriating experience. Practically everything was in slow motion; the goals were badly edited and shot from such obtuse angles you couldn't really enjoy them; they kept cutting to extraneous details that weren't important and trying to fit events into some kind of arbitrary narrative that was of FIFA's imagining. Watching it you could almost imagine Football's governing body had no understanding of the game.
Still could be worse: if Wong Kar Wai made a FIFA World Cup film, not only would it have all these flaws, and to an accentuated and unprecedented degree, but every match would take place in torrential rain or a snowstorm and he'd stick a tale of thwarted love into it.
After such grand yet muted romances as In The Mood For Love and 2146, Grandmaster is a tentative (second) venture into the world of martial arts, with another telling of the oft told tale of Ip Man (Leong), who's been the subject of more biopics than Stephen Hawking. He was one of the great Kung Fu masters of the previous century though his international fame is based on him tutoring Bruce Lee. Usually martial movies are associated with movement and energetic editing. In WKW's hands they are much more stately affair – Slouching Tiger, Hidden Action Sequences. Here, the practice of Kung Fu resembles the work of a stage magician and its various moves are pieces of misdirection – an arm shots out there, cut, a body swivels, cut, and then as if by magic his opponent is flying through the air towards a glass window. Ip Man stands there with his arm outstretched and his palm facing upwards, totally unruffled while the audience wonder how on earth he did that, he didn't even move? You wonder if its all done by mirrors but it can't be because he keeps propelling opponents into them.
Grandmaster is lavish and sumptuous, sprawling like Dr Zhivago yet modest and intimate like a chamber piece; a compressed epic. It is also barely coherent, particularly in the truncated version released here. For a film about a discipline that needs intense focus, it never establishes which is tree and which is wood.
As an action film it's ludicrous, but as a Wong Kar Wai film it has merit. Only Tony Leong could convincingly play a passive Kung Fu master, one who seems to be a helpless bystander in his own fight scene. (I was less convinced by Zhang Ziyi as his thwarted love interest: she has reached a stage where her attempts at being aloof and unattainable come across as everything being too much bother for her.) It also looks incredible. He may have finally parted ways with Christopher Doyle and the palette is a little more muted than in his classic films, but with his new DP Philippe Le Sourd he stills seems to have use of colour palette 2.0, an upgrade that nobody else has as yet been given access to.
