On the most recent Sight & Sound Critics Poll in 2012, Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” was voted the 24th best movie of all time, the highest of all films from this century. “In the Mood for Love” is a lush tone poem, bursting with color and passion in moody, emotive style.
In broadening his palette to a period piece martial arts studio film, it would be easy for a stylist such as Wong to fall into the same trap as countless other directors who got messy once allowed to paint on a bigger canvas.
“The Grandmaster” however immediately stands out from the crowd. Wong’s stylization breaks from the modern Hollywood tradition and achieves ethereal tones just seeping with emotion in all its slow motion, camera twirls, hazy filters and silvery gray undertones. Wong’s film is a sly, tense, mysterious and immense work of art that just barely keeps from buckling under its own weight.
“The Grandmaster” is the biopic of the Ip Man (Tony Leung), a true-to-life martial arts master from Southern China who fought during World War II, traveled to Hong Kong in the ‘50s and became a teacher responsible for the training of Bruce Lee. Early portions of the film show him training for a fight with a kung fu rival to the North named Ma Sang (Jin Zhang). He’s the heir to the Gong family lineage of fighting styles, but the rightful heir Gong Er (Ziyi Zhang) seeks retribution and is the only true warrior who rivals Ip Man’s skills.
The fight scenes in “The Grandmaster” are dazzling. The camera circles the room with grace and symmetry, and Wong focuses in not strictly on the blows but the Earthly tremors their impacts create and their gliding bodies as they slip across the snow or through the rain. Other directors would over stylize such images for sheer catharsis, but Wong invokes the natural elements and their sustaining presence in these epic fights.
At times Wong paints a luminescent snowscape or rainstorm as a backdrop for what can actually be seen here as a martial art, while at others the frame is filled with hellish amber tones, billowing smoke from a train’s smokestack, a monkey screaming on a warrior’s shoulder and beacons of light roaring in from the side.
This attention to detail allows Wong to embed philosophy and existentialism into the dialogue and story in a big way without ever letting up. For all its fighting, “The Grandmaster” is a solemn, stately and picturesque affair. As Ip Man goes through his training and encounters various styles of fighting, the film becomes loaded with historical culture as it relates to the war and the Japanese invasion.
But at the same time, the surrounding visuals make “The Grandmaster” ultimately a film about appreciating art and culture while recognizing art’s fleeting beauty compared to nature in the grand scheme of spiritual forces. Gong Er considers as much when she asks why her family’s tradition should be spared and remembered over all others throughout centuries.
Such themes are a heavy burden for a kung fu movie to carry, and “The Grandmaster” starts to feel long and clunky as the whole movie strives to maintain its soaring intensity. The film’s lovely score either sings with operatic wonder or pounds away with powerful timpani. It feels as though it is in a perpetual climax, and a lot of it begins to feel too precious as rippling water and intertitles of love letters appear amongst random montages.
And yet Wong must be applauded for “The Grandmaster’s” miracle of sound design. That the miniature grace notes within battle are all treated with orchestral flourishes helps the film attain that state of tense, quiet resonance at all times.
“The Grandmaster” is so stunning to look at that it earns emotion and depth in ways that the dialogue and story don’t. In that way, those looking for a conventional kung fu movie may be disappointed. “The Grandmaster” is violent and merciless, but it oozes artistry, culture and pure style.
3 stars