A martial arts movie by Wong Kar Wai, and easily the most straight-up genre piece he's done apart from As Tears Go By, from right back at the beginning of his spectacular career. Having said that, it certainly has his distinctive feel, with the allusive and metaphorical possibilities of the genre and its philosophical underpinnings coming richly to life through the film's characters and images. And, like all WKW films, The Grandmaster is preoccupied with the passage of time, piercingly and nostalgically backwards-looking, staging its variations on that theme, along with other familiar motifs of connection and disconnection, reflection and doubling, amidst the frequent fight scenes.
The most satisfying of those set pieces comes about two thirds of the way through, when Zhang Ziyi's (incidentally, a revelation - while she's always an ornament to any film she's in, here she turns in a truly great performance) character, Gong Er, confronts the renegade Ma San (Zhang Jin, who I don't think I've seen before) who had killed her father years (I think) earlier - the silk to his steel, as the narratorial voice of the legendary martial artist Ip Man (played by a weathered Tony Leung with a gravitas befitting both the character and the actor's own stature) had earlier described it. Many of the lush, beautiful settings of the film are only loosely tied to a naturalistic perspective - at times calling to mind that spectacular expressionistic overture to von Trier's Melancholia - but this one, probably the film's highlight, comes closest to pure fantasy, as the two adversaries face off against each other on a train platform as the snow comes down, a seemingly endless train racing by behind them.
The Grandmaster isn't perfect - most jarringly, the character and arc of the Razor (Chang Chen) is oddly undeveloped, and while the director's past form might lead us to expect a certain elliptical unresolvedness, the comparatively straightforward narrative progression of this one leaves the sub-plot feeling more like a loose end than a genuinely illuminating resonance. But all told, it's still rather wonderful - an immersive, involving, poetic film, painting from a vivid palette and anchored by an emotional core. Wong's one of my very favourite directors, and he doesn't disappoint here.
The most satisfying of those set pieces comes about two thirds of the way through, when Zhang Ziyi's (incidentally, a revelation - while she's always an ornament to any film she's in, here she turns in a truly great performance) character, Gong Er, confronts the renegade Ma San (Zhang Jin, who I don't think I've seen before) who had killed her father years (I think) earlier - the silk to his steel, as the narratorial voice of the legendary martial artist Ip Man (played by a weathered Tony Leung with a gravitas befitting both the character and the actor's own stature) had earlier described it. Many of the lush, beautiful settings of the film are only loosely tied to a naturalistic perspective - at times calling to mind that spectacular expressionistic overture to von Trier's Melancholia - but this one, probably the film's highlight, comes closest to pure fantasy, as the two adversaries face off against each other on a train platform as the snow comes down, a seemingly endless train racing by behind them.
The Grandmaster isn't perfect - most jarringly, the character and arc of the Razor (Chang Chen) is oddly undeveloped, and while the director's past form might lead us to expect a certain elliptical unresolvedness, the comparatively straightforward narrative progression of this one leaves the sub-plot feeling more like a loose end than a genuinely illuminating resonance. But all told, it's still rather wonderful - an immersive, involving, poetic film, painting from a vivid palette and anchored by an emotional core. Wong's one of my very favourite directors, and he doesn't disappoint here.
