The last I heard of Wong Kar Wai was when he was doing some sort of film with Nicole Kidman that hasn't seen the light of day. By pure chance I managed to catch this fantastic film on RED.
The film is about the life and times of Wing Chun grandmaster Yip Man, whose students included the legendary Bruce Lee. Many may recognize the name from Donnie Yen's great Ip Man films. But this film is about so much more than Yip Man himself. In fact, the title could refer to any of the other martial arts Grandmasters who were contemporaries of Yip Man at this time.
The Grandmaster takes place in a time of great social change as war, industrialization, and the transition to modern times began to change Chinese society. There were no more emperors, instead there were nationalists and communists taking the place of the old guard. At the same time, this cultural upheaval affected Chinese martial arts as well.
The characters of The Grandmaster are martial arts masters now out of place in a world that is moving away from their old traditions. And while some accept this paradigm shift and adapt to the changing times, some refuse to accept these new ideals and fall. We can see this in Gong Er, played by Zhang Ziyi, whose adherence to the old ways begins a spiral of self destruction.
And in true Wong Kar-wai style, there's a romance in there somewhere. It's all quite subtle, but this romance is as much a romance of ideals as it is a romance of love. There's a lot of pining for love lost, or love forgotten.
The film is not without flaws, some characters, such as Yip Man's wife and some of the other Grandmasters are unceremoniously pushed aside in the second half of the film, only to resurface briefly later.
You see this love (and many other emotions) in the many fight scenes throughout the film. In contrast to Donnie Yen's Ip Man, whose ferocity captured Wing Chun as a physical art, the fights in this film resemble Chinese Opera - capturing the "art" in the martial art. Each fight in this movie has a meaning. A fight in this movie can be a battle for and of ideals, a battle for lost love, a battle for revenge, expressed in every punch and kick given and taken. The fluid fight choreography and penchant for stylistic action scenes is very much reminiscent of Lee Myung-se's Duelist (2005) and Wong's own Ashes of Time (1994).
It's not the best of Wong's oeuvre, but it's still a hell of a movie.
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