Keep your eye on that hat, which retains its iconographic power even when Ip Man takes it off to, say, take down a roomful of opponents. Even amid the violent whirlpools of rain and bodies, that hat never leaves his head. The men are warriors, street fighters with furious fists and winged feet, who have massed together on a dark, rainy night to take on Ip Man (Tony Leung), a still figure in a long coat and an elegant white hat. Production companies: Beijing Century Partner Culture & Media Inc.“The Grandmaster,” a hypnotically beautiful dream from the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, opens with curls of smoke, eddies of water and men soaring and flying across the frame as effortlessly as silk ribbons. An offbeat but enjoyable score by An Wei, who draws on everything from fuzzy semi-funk to nuevo tango pioneer Astor Piazzolla, furthers the pic’s odd variety of cool.ĭistributor: United Entertainment Partners Some viewers will find the film’s mannered performances and direction silly but while Wang Tianlin’s lensing doesn’t match the luxuriant sheen that Christopher Doyle and Philippe Le Sourd have delivered for Wong, the production elements do add up to a coherent style. In one characteristically odd sequence, husband and wife have a long (and calm) discussion of Chen’s upbringing and dreams while he is fending off 20 street thugs with a long bamboo pole. Xu cares more about Chen’s marriage than his focus on combat might suggest. Bare-hand fighting is invigorating here, but the knives are where it’s at: We are treated to an encyclopedic display of styles, usually with Chen wielding a butterfly sword in each hand (not to be confused with the switchblade-like butterfly knife) and taking down men wielding pole axes, skateboard-sized swords and curvy-bladed hand weapons that would make a Klingon cringe. Xu choreographed the action himself, with plenty of long shots, and revels in combat that, however unlikely in a narrative sense, is credible in physical terms.
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Here, but especially in other scenes involving Chen, the movie thrills.
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In a script that often moves abruptly - for all the methodical explanations they give, these characters can still surprise us when they act - Xu skips over the usual Chen-training-Geng business and gets into the series of battles the youngster has trained for. At the core of things is a quartet of characters: Chen the wife he proposes to before they’ve ever spoken (Song Jia, who deepens the character’s complicated nature) Zheng (Jin Shi-Jye), a local master who wants to ensure that ancient knowledge is passed down and Geng (Song Yeng), a cocksure prodigy who becomes Chen’s apprentice after hitting on his wife (?).
This setup will soon get much more complicated, with further proxies, double-crosses and motivations that may be more comprehensible to Chinese audiences than they are here. While it lacks the filmmaking mastery that has carried some wuxia pictures to mainstream success Stateside, it is more than handsome and stylish enough to win over many of the fence-sitters who’ve learned to appreciate the genre’s highlights.
As infused with seriousness about kung fu philosophy as his earlier work but also deeply invested in a complicated set of social rules governing behavior in Tianjin, then a hotbed of chopsocky training, the picture has a strong appeal to genre fans. Xu Haofeng, the best-selling author of martial-arts fiction who co-wrote the script for Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster, returns to the director’s chair with another tale of 1930s expert fighters in The Final Master.
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