The Grandmaster

When I was an undergraduate in College, I had a friend who was an enthusiast, a pot head, and a mystic. He told me that a Chinese restaurant in downtown Minneapolis was operated by a famous Kung Fu master. This man was an exponent of the Praying Mantis style of fighting and was so lethal that it was alleged that he could kill an opponent merely by glaring at him. The master’s Hunan-style cuisine was also fabulous. Supposedly, this deadly chef taught both cooking and martial arts. When my pot head buddy expostulated on this subject, his voice was hushed and he adopted a reverential tone and, when he compared the various schools of Kung Fu, always concluding that the restauranteur’s “Southen Praying Mantis” style was the most wonderful and deadly, his discourse wandered between occult forms of Buddhism, varieties of teleportation, and the mysteries of the Chih -- it was strangely exhilarating to hear of these things for about ten minutes, but my friend’s enthusiasm drove him to lecture me at length, an hour or ninety minutes, and, after a while, my eyes glazed over from sheer and exquisite boredom of it all. I must confess that Wong Kar-Wei’s 2013 Kung Fu epic, “The Grandmaster” has the same effect on me. The movie is exquisitely beautiful, wonderfully refined, and fanatically misguided. Gong Er, the doomed heroine of the film, intones this line over a gorgeous flashback showing her as a little girl watching her father practicing outside in a snowstorm: “When I was growing up, the most common sound that I heard was breaking bones.” Gong Er is the beautiful daughter of the greatest Northern Kung Fu master. In 1930, the film’s hero, the titular Grandmaster, Ip Man, travels to Manchuria, where the snow is always falling like soft, warm cherry blossoms. Ip Man wants to learn the Northern Master’s style: “64 Feet” -- the varieties of Kung Fu have strangely poetic and bizarre names. The first third of the film takes place in a gilded brothel where Ip Man has to fight and defeat practitioners of various schools of martial arts. After succeeding in these lushly choreographed duels, he then is matched with the beauteous and fierce Gong Er. This battle takes place on a stair in the golden brothel and ends in a sort of draw -- Ip Man seizing hold of Gong Er in an iconic gestures, his hand around her ivory arm, as she falls downward in the stairwell. This touch apparently arouses a lifetime passion in Gong Er for Ip Man, a love that, alas, is never consummated and, indeed, only admitted in the last ten minutes of the picture. The Japanese invade and Ip Man’s two daughters starve to death off-screen -- their deaths matter so little that this tragedy is admitted only in an intertitle. Man deserts his wife in Manchuria and goes to Hong Kong where Dr. Zhivago-style the forces of history separate him from his family. He meets Gong Er in 1950. She has been working as a doctor in a slum in Hong Kong. has renounced martial arts, and has become an opium addict. In an flashback, we see her fighting and killing her father’s disciple who has become a lackey of the brutal Japanese. The battle takes place on a railroad platform with a diesel train roaring by and is shot in luminous honeyed tones -- all close-ups of hands slashing through the omnipresent Manchurian snow, feet gliding over ice, blows so powerful that they shatter metal walls and unseat steel bars screwed into the concrete, giant close-ups of iron bending and coming unstuck, faces like luminous masks hovering over the violence in Godfather-like Rembrandt-tinged darkness. In this fight, Gong Er is badly hurt and her pain has made her into an opium addict: she reclines in the opulent coiling smoke, as beautiful as Julie Christie smoking opium in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”, and the music plays variations on Ennio Morricone’s most nostalgic and beautiful compositions. “64 feet” will never seen again, Gong Er tells us and, like the thwarted heroine and hero in Wong Kar-Wei’s great and morose “In the Mood for Love”, she confesses her great passion to the impassive Ip Man and, then, walks down a studio alley way, trailed by a dog, vanishing into a silent-movie-style set like something from Von Sternberg -- all tinsel and velvet shadow and rim lit hair and neon in the puddles and amber in the air -- where, of course, she dies of a broken heart. Ip Man played by Tony Leung looks surprisingly like Barack Obama and speaks in short sententious epigrams. “Kung Fu,” he tells us, “is the vertical and horizontal -- that’s all.” What in the hell does that mean? The movie is a great folly, a film that Wong Kar-Wei began working on in 2007 and financed, in part, with booty from making commercials in a similarly lush and ornate style for Dior. BMW, Lacoste, and Chivas Regal. Shooting was halted due to injuries sustained by actors; apparently, Tony Leung broke his arm learning Kung Fu fighting styles from real grandmasters and production of the movie was halted several times. The picture is completely claustrophobic -- even the exquisite outdoor scenes feel like they have been filmed indoors -- and the plot is inscrutable: people fighting for no apparent reason all the time. Furthermore, the movie’s big pay-off is curiously anti-climactic: Ip Man, it turns out, is the Master who trained the young Bruce Lee -- this is his claim to fame: it’s like a film about Shakespeare ending with scenes demonstrating that the poet inspired Baz Luhrman or “West Side Story.” No one ages in this movie and everything takes place in glittering, mirror-empire of gilded walls and ceilings, gardens slowly filling up with snow, decorous tea-houses poised against the darkness, and teeming modern cities that look completely medieval -- I don’t recall a single automobile in the film. I think the movie is a failure although certainly extraordinary enough visually. Some of the picture is unintentionally funny: the duel between and Wan Chung master and a man with a “singing razor” is given as much screen-time as the entire Japanese invasion, an episode in history that is reduced to a couple of flamboyant explosions and a beheading in a rainstorm. Of course, it’s hard to judge this picture -- the version that I saw was mutilated: 108 minutes long when the director’s cut famous in China is 130 minutes. My surmise is that the long version would be so tedious as to be unwatchable, but who knows?