But she is quite adept at the old man's style, as evidenced in a remarkably choreographed fight with Ip and battles fought during a later revenge quest. The film is at its best when Ip Man (Wong regular Tony Leung Chiu Wai) interacts with a fictional character, Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), who, as the daughter of an aged martial arts master, cannot inherit his position because of her gender. The otherworldly feeling is enhanced by Ip Man's oracular utterances, thankfully leavened with occasional humor. (Ip Man has been the subject of other films, notably two starring Donnie Yen, but they inhabit another universe from Wong's work.) The fight scenes are balletic, and there's a lush, sometimes overripe, air about the whole movie.
Wong ("Chungking Express," "In the Mood for Love" and many other features) focuses on Ip Man's life roughly from the 1930s to the '50s, and includes his role in helping sort out the rivalries among Northern and Southern Chinese kung fu schools, the effect on his life of the second Sino-Japanese war, and his later experiences teaching martial arts in Hong Kong.Īs you would expect from this filmmaker, a master stylist capable of exquisite images, this isn't an ordinary martial arts picture. The film is beautiful but troubled, achieving in stretches the director's signature dreamy mood but dragged down by narrative confusions. Wong Kar Wai clearly had epic ambitions for "The Grandmaster," his long-awaited film on the influential martial arts master Ip Man, who trained Bruce Lee. In Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles.
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