The Grandmaster

I have been eager to see The Grandmaster.  I enjoy director Wong Kar Wai's stylized moodiness, Tony Leung's handsome and inscrutable half smile, and film version kung fu fighting.  Kung fu looks like ballet with impact to me, and with lots of potential chaos to boot.

Despite all the feet featured, including a fighter with bound feet, the film falls short of finding reliable footing.  Nonetheless, the visuals are gorgeous, with all the noir detail and painterly composition.  Other than a single beautiful scene on a snowy spring day, the conditions are always dark and rainy.  The puddles provide plenty of reflective surfaces, lamp light makes faces glow, and the slow motion splashes become music video cinematic.

The fight scenes are exquisitely choreographed by the kung fu film master Woo Ping Yuen.  One fight adjacent to a still train that begins moving with increasing speed behind the action seems to bring the very concept of time under question.  Alterations in film speed for the fight scenes demand focus and suspension of disbelief.  When "real time" resumes, our perceptions are changed.

The music is, suitably, often operatic.  The percussion of fists and feet become their own tonal soundtrack. Language alternates between 2 dialects:  Mandarin for the northern kung fu groups, Cantonese for the southern.  The dialect variation adds texture to character depiction; listen for the shifts.

Tony Leung and ZiYi Zhang are lovely to watch as they linger in stillness then erupt into action.  Of course, this is Wong Kar Wai writing and directing, so love is bittersweet, defeats multiply like raindrops, and even the dead are beautiful.

The thematic footing of The Grandmaster seem a bit operatically bound even when the visuals soar.  Time is disjointed, seasons jump sequence, actions begin with a glance, and then we have the rise and fall of historical events. It's a leap to keep up and make sense of much of this.  Perhaps that is his intention, to keep us moving while we wonder.