They play out like games of strategy that happen to use human bodies: as much the effort of heads and hearts as of fists and feet. Beyond looking like the work of artists who know every punch and kick ever thrown, the scenes are elegant and lyrical in ways that make them the opposite of visceral. Wong spent years researching kung-fu history and interviewing its practitioners, and it shows. The fight scenes-which often slow down the action and direct the focus to hands and feet colliding with flesh, and bodies hitting inanimate objects-don’t spare the details. Wong’s innovations come in the action scenes, choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, a grandmaster in his own field, best known in the West for his work in The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
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Soon, Ip is being tested on both fronts, but primarily in a series of fight scenes with other masters, who test the limits of his wing chun technique. Anyone capable of bridging the gaps between these schools will have to demonstrate skill in combat, of course, but also show tremendous philosophical acumen. So far, in fact, that Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang) the retiring grandmaster of the north, has come to pay his respects to the city’s kung-fu masters-but especially Ip-as he considers naming a grandmaster of the south in an effort to unite far-flung schools of combat. (Recently, he was the subject of several films, the best-known of them starring Donnie Yen.) As The Grandmaster begins in the mid-1930s, Ip is in the prime of his life, a happily married family man with a reputation that stretches far beyond his home in the southern city of Foshan. Wong’s longtime leading man, Tony Leung, stars as Ip Man, a real-life martial artist now most famous for having trained young Bruce Lee. The problem, here at least, is that it sometimes doesn’t go far enough.
In time, however, Wong’s usual concerns overwhelm the film, and though his pairing of fisticuffs and longing is sometimes awkward, he surrounds the awkwardness with some of the most beautiful images in his career. The Grandmaster, Wong’s latest, returns him to the world of martial arts for the first time since Ashes, and it initially feels like a departure from his usual themes: It opens with a gorgeous fight scene set in the middle of a rainstorm, then puts its hero through a series of physical, rather than emotional, challenges. Wong tends to turn any material into Wong Kar-wai movies, moody films filled with dislocated dreamers burdened with tremendous melancholy, but also prone to moments of joy that redeem it all (or come close enough to make the suffering at least feel like it was worth it). There’s no mistaking one for the other, but there’s also no mistaking either for the work of any other filmmaker. The latter, shot on the fly during a break from editing Ashes, paired two stories set in contemporary Hong Kong.
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