Berlin Film Festival 2013: The Grandmaster, review

Berlin Film Festival 2013

The Berlin Film Festival has scored a theoretical coup opening with The Grandmaster, the first feature in five years from Hong Kong's arthouse darling Wong Kar-Wai. Like all of his movies, it's a melancholy romance at heart, but punctuated in this case with long and meticulously choreographed sequences of gravity-defying martial arts. The instant reference point for most viewers will be Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with which the movie shares two stars, Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen, but Wong's return to the wuxia genre, which he previously explored in 1994's remarkable Ashes of Time, is a much more studied, narratively elliptical creation.


His inspiration is the life of the legendary Ip Man, who mentored Bruce Lee in the Wing Chun style of martial arts. Played by regular Wong lead Tony Leung, Ip is first glimpsed in a dark, rain-spattered opening set piece taking down all comers with his fiendish prowess. Inventively mounted by nonpareil stunt co-ordinator Yuen Woo-ping, it establishes Wong's lavish but distanced approach: the music comes on heavy, as does his trademark use of juddering slow motion. No one can shoot drops of blood falling into puddles with quite this director's swooning air of reverie, but the strangely muted sound effects in every one of these gorgeous sequences sacrifice a great deal of immediacy and impact.


The fateful, if brief, encounter in the film happens between Ip and his counterpart from North China, the acrobatic Gong Er (Zhang), whose father, a noted grandmaster in their field, is on the verge of retirement. The movie jumps forwards, back and forwards again to examine their unconsummated relationship, ending inevitably on a train platform, and its entire emotional core hangs on this exquisitely lit sequence. Unfortunately, it misses, because the script is too keen to trade in dubious philosophising and dodgy similes: "In life, as in chess, when a move is played it stays on the board," declares Ip, which will be news to anyone who's been the victim of a forking knight attack.


Both stars have excelled before in archetypal wuxia roles, but the through-line of Ip and Gong's great lost love here is seriously wanting. Though Leung handles the athletic demands of his part with perfect sangfroid, his face is thickening with age, and the saddest thought it inspires is the shelf-life on his leonine beauty. Zhang, ravishing throughout in every costume they find for her, allows emotion to crack through the porcelain just once – it's a memorable effect, but too late