Critics reviews

It's not surprising that Wong would turn towards the language of martial arts to find a new perspective for his recurring obsessions. Jia Zhangke relied on wuxia tropes and set-ups for A Touch of Sin (2013), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's next film will be a period martial-arts work; like them, Wong takes martial arts as an agent of cultural memory very seriously.

The Grandmaster perhaps earns the dubious honour of being the first martial arts movie that comes across as completely non-violent, like Wong didn't view the cause or effect of the various altercations as demonstrations of power and dominance. It's as if the various styles are modes of articulation and this is a movie about discourse of a more primal variety. It's not a kick-ass action movie, but it's still very strange and beautiful in its own idiosyncratic way.

Wong is the modern auteurist's dreamtime superhero, and what he's done here... is convert the martial arts saga, with its strange hierarchal struggles and ideas of honor and repetitious matches, into an imagistic opera, a roaring aria of Wongian rue and mourning. None of the epic and wickedly shot-and-cut battle scenes matter in the story so much as a single coat button, representing, as so many innocent but totemic objects do in Wong, a heartbreaking as gorgeous as falling snow.

This utterly sensorial kaleidoscope, this irregular and oneiric fable, savagely jumps in many directions and follows many different devices. The storytelling is layered, blending – as usual in the work of this poet-director – small islands of marvelously spectacular entities with some (epic) historical events, and speeding up to the vertiginous from dreamy slowness.

The Grandmaster has its partisans. Some of them are Wong loyalists. But he fills me with ambivalence. His lugubriousness can be enervating, and his interest in things left unsaid and untouched is the sexual equivalent of being stuck in traffic: You can see your exit, you just can't get off. His intensely rapturous imagery doesn't come all the way through here and neither do most of the supporting characters.

The movie is shot through with scraps of memory: near misses and lost loves, blows and triumphs, all slowed down, extended and nursed in retrospect, the way you can't help tonguing a toothache. To paraphrase critic Peter Brunette, Wong's style, rich as it is, doesn't obscure meaning in his movies — it is the meaning.

Where Wong's earlier films create a beautiful tension between their characters' outward reservations and internal passions, the visual beauty of The Grandmaster feels disconnected from its characters' emotional inertia. For the first time in his career, Wong's most striking qualities as a filmmaker—his elliptical storytelling, his knack for imbuing tiny moments with great significance—register as a smoke screen for having little to say.

The Grandmaster"... strikes me as Wong's strongest film since "In the Mood for Love" and surprisingly credible as an exercise in kung fu stylistics as well as temps perdu. Less narrative than a somewhat elliptical series of situations, "The Grandmaster" is commercial without seeming slick, grave but not fetishistic in its representation of martial arts master Ip Man(Tony Leung), whose students included Bruce Lee.

[In watching the the Chinese cut,] I now appreciate the brilliance of Wong placing this climactic fight long before the film ends; in a conventional action film, this would seem like poor placement, but here it's intended as a fatal moment of destiny whose consequences ripple through the rest of the film, and pours out into a larger awareness of all the knowledge and art that's been lost to history.

Grandmaster" 3.0 flows beautifully out of Wong's prior musings on doomed love without sacrificing his old fascination for elliptical storytelling and his new interest in turning the "chop socky" school into a luscious dance for the eyes and ears.

I haven't seen the 130-minute Hong Kong cut of "The Grandmaster" or the fabled four-hour rough cut but I do sense that the 108 minute version entering American theaters is a mere trailer for something grander and deeper. The film I saw moves, but often as if prodded along, reality television/cop-show style. This artificial propulsion hits several speed bumps of explanatory inter-titles that I suspect were inserted just to avoid including corresponding scenes that ate up running time.

Wong Kar-wai isn't known for making martial arts movies; his one contribution to the related wuxia genre, Ashes of Time, is the most experimental thing he's ever done. But he is a master of the physical — of texture and movement. AndThe Grandmaster is rooted in this very physical world.