TONY LEONG CHIU-WAI IN THE GRANDMASTER The Grandmaster is about the Wing Chun practioner Ip Man, who taught, among others, Bruce Lee.
Like all Wong Kar-wai films it's delicious eye-candy, but maybe the first thing we need to be aware of about
The Grandmaster is that it's chopped up. There is a four-hour version that presumably may express the filmmaker's intentions. And there is a 124-minute trimmed-down "international" version; the one reviewed in China in January for
Variety by Maggie Lee was 130 minutes. For US theatrical consumption the Weinstein company is issuing, with an August 23, 2013 release, a further stripped-down 108-minute version. With this in mind, you won't be surprised to find reviewers reporting "structural problems." The main one of these is that a female competitor/potential lover of Ip Man, Gong Er (Zhang Yiyi), daughter of one of his chief rivals, gets a lengthy bio of her own in the second half of the shorter version that pulls the whole film's trajectory out of shape.
Still, the Weinstein version (which is all I've seen) is nonetheless elegant, gorgeous, nifty, true to Wong Kar-wai's style and sensibility. It partakes of his love of atmosphere and nostalgia, of artistic perfection and of martial arts novels, and has the advantage over the Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee style of gllitzy Chines costume epics of being set in a noirish China of fedoras, wifebeaters, and raincoats that runs through the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. One big kung fu fight takes place in a railway station with a train rushing by a few feet away the whole time. And though I miss the sexy slum apartments and the gunfights of Wong's other, earlier films, Derek Elley's expert description in
Film Business Asia points out that this is the most epigrammatic and literary of his scenarios. So stay tuned for two weeks from now.
Preview. Full review will come at the time of the US release, August 23, 2013.
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