The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai 2013)
It's been months, almost half a year--time to start writing again. The much awaited new Wong Kar-wai film, certainly a comeback after the questionable My Blueberry Nights (2007), nonetheless leaves me with a certain ambivalence, a persistent ringing, if you will, which I would like to put into words. The film follows the story of the martial arts master known as Ip Man, played by Tony Leung, through the tribulations of the Chinese twentieth century. Beginning in the rivalry and attempted unification between "northern" and "southern" kung fu styles, the film takes a turn from "spring" into "winter" with the Japanese occupation of Foshan where the protagonist lives. Ip Man ends up after the war in Hong Kong, where he re-encounters Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi), the daughter of the aging northern grandmaster, with whom he had fallen in love during a beautifully edited fight earlier in the film. The familiar trope of the missed encounter even in reunion unfolds here: Gong Er has vowed not to marry and not to practice kung fu as revenge against her adopted brother for his collaboration with the Manchukuo regime. The irruption of history makes for unfulfilled possibilities, "like a chess game left in mid-match," as Gong Er says in a segment of well-crafted literary dialogue, characteristic of the film as a whole.
Much has already been said elsewhere about the way in which the film derails conventions of the genre (e.g. Shelley Kraicer's review in Cinemascope)--this much can be taken as a given, since this is not the first time Wong slowed down and sped up the movement in a martial arts film, nor can the introduction of history and elliptical narration into such a genre be taken in this day as a sign of authorial genius. What perplexes me instead seems to be the insistence on the part of Wong in situating his signature style--with its manipulations of movement, poetic non-linear editing, its familiar pathos of nostalgia and separation--within the skeleton of a historical epic. The telltale signs of the historical film are all there: titles introducing historical personages, intertitles announcing the arrival of events and the fates of characters, a toned down color palette, the interspersing of archival footage as establishing shots for dramatic development. Such are methods most acutely found in recent "official" PRC historicals, released to commemorate important dates, such as The Opium War (1997) or, and forgive me if the comparison is in bad taste, The Founding of a Party [alternatively The Great Revival] (2011). The latter film, released on the 90 year anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, pushes the use of introductory titles to the extreme, leaving the uninitiated viewer with a kitchen sink of "important figures" whose narrative lines disappear shortly after they are introduced--no doubt an effect of having to satisfy an equally messy sink of distinguished personages in the present. The titles, in the aforementioned film as well as in The Grandmaster, seem to be an effort at nailing things down, of securing the link between free floating affects and the bare bones of a historical reality, reduced, in final instance, to a series of dates and names, and the occasional found footage which bears in its production values the signature of time. All corresponding to an official chronology of "China at large" in the twentieth century: 1937, 1945, 1949, 1951...
Anxiety of the digital? No doubt. This is certainly not the first film in which Wong Kar-wai has exhibited a fetishizing awareness of small mementos: the expiration dates on canned food in Chungking Express, a drawer of receipts in Fallen Angels, the 2046 of 2046. The architecture of numbers give at least something to hold onto in a floating world and "culture of disappearance," even, and especially if the numbers are the call signs of the ephemeral. The choice to place Grandmaster within the common chronology of the PRC seems deliberate, especially for the first film of the director that locates significant portions of the diegesis on the twentieth century mainland. The film hints at the need to take leave of the cosmopolitan provinciality of Hong Kong in order to think "China at large," even if this involves a certain complicity with the key points of PRC historiography. The desire, however, is to open up this historiography to something else that is yet quite ambiguous. "We Cantonese don't just think in terms of north and south," says Ip Man. It is with this problem in mind that I want to discuss a few of the film's aesthetic preoccupations.
The Grandmaster features an overwhelming interest in group photographs and frontal mise-en-scene configurations. Characters are shown to quite literally step into photographs, which sometimes dissolve into grainy still images, and more rarely into images of real photographs taken of Ip Man and his family or disciples. Of particular interest are moments in which the grain and the creases in an old black and white photograph are superimposed directly onto the screen where moving characters are in the process of posing. Here, digital processes bring to the foreground the telltale signs of the photograph's authenticity, its direct physical relationship to reality: they freeze the present in the form of the past. The relationship between the archive and the contemporary, here, is a two-way street. The frontality of the film's archival photographs shuttle the oblique angles and extreme close-ups that dominate most of its duration into a fictional and operatic realm, while the passage of moving images into old photographs suggest a desire to fix the floating image to a discrete temporality, to a moment, any moment whatsoever but a definite one: today the image is in search of its punctum.
The highly stylized combat sequences replete with stitched-together with slow-motion close-ups exhibit a similar temporal tension. The actual choreography of the fights (particularly between Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi, two actors whose martial-arts abilities are doubtful, although it is said that both went through several years of training in the making of the film) seem to emphasize single moves, or a short series, slowed down for atmospheric effect. Wong's time-axis manipulation, as in his photographs, searches steadfastly for the secrets of movement. Unlike Marey and Mulbridge, for Wong movement is always a missed encounter, and hence, each sweep of Ip Man's feet in the rain drenched street becomes the index of nostalgia. Here, the pathos is decidedly different from that of In the Mood for Love and 2046. The sights and scenes of mid-century Hong Kong are rendered in found footage, while the auras of everyday life are toned down, with a blander color palette, tending toward a far more generic mode: an elaborately decorated brothel (reminiscent of Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower), a snowy expanse, a rainy street, raindrops on a straw hat. These are worlds taken from a range of cinematic references, and are perhaps the dream of a meeting place between lovers. But this place is always elusive insofar as the terms of the original separation shift without notice. Unfulfilled love in Wong's cinema is never simply a matrix for heterosexual frustration nor is it strictly allegory for historical divisions (Hong Kong/China), but the definition of what escapes. Here, Wong draws from a rich tradition of historical family melodramas, such as The Spring River Flows East (Cai Chusheng, 1947), in which modern historical circumstances drive a family apart. The protagonist of the genre is never one or the other character but the emotional tone of the separation itself, concretized as war or class or politics but never exhausted in it. In a pivotal sequence, grandmaster Gong challenges Ip Man to break the moon cake he holds in his hand (a cake that symbolizes da tuanyuan, completed retribution or the happy ending). In their dance to achieve the best position from which to administer the blow (here recalling the Tai Chi competition of "pushing hands"), the moon cake breaks on its own accord. If Wong Kar-wai is the master of dancing without touching, of pure and indefinite syncopation, then The Grandmaster is what happens to the cake.
