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HOPELESS ROMANTIC WONG KAR WAI FIGHTS HIMSELF TO A STANDSTILL IN THE GRANDMASTER BY ANDREW CHAN
NO OTHER WORKING DIRECTOR IS QUITE AS ATTUNED AS Wong Kar Wai to the frequent baselessness of human desire. Psychology has been of little interest to him throughout his career; character motivations are not so much elusive as barely contemplated; social milieux figure in his films not as subjects to be grappled with but as poetic counterpoint to inchoate, inexpressible longings. Consider this fact alongside his staunch commitment to old-fashioned ideals of physical beauty (evident in his uniformly gorgeous lead actors and unfailingly sumptuous cinematography), and it's no wonder that even ardent fans have come to suspect that his penchant for pretty pictures might be more appropriately channeled in the realms of fashion photography or advertising-mediums that demand nothing deeper than the all-encompassing fetishism of the camera.
It's tempting to hail The Grandmaster as Wong's long-anticipated return to form, if only to atone for the fickle, popularity-contest tendencies of auteurist film culture. Not only has he given up the ersatz Americana of My Blueberry Nights (07), which mercilessly laid bare the shallowest aspects of his style, he's also continuing to mine the look and feel of a bygone Chinese era that served as inspiration for a trio of retro-chic masterpieces: In the Mood for Love (00), 2046 (04), and the erotic short "The Hand" in the omnibus film Eros (04). In The Grandmaster's flashier moments, you can almost hear him grumbling from behind the screen: "They want qipaos, I'll give them qipaosl" But within this familiar framework, the material presents fresh challenges for a director whose aesthetic, even at its best, has long since calcified: it's his first biopic, his most blatantly commercial project ever, and a martial-arts tale whose traditionalism (in stark contrast to his 1994 wuxia mind-boggier Ashes of Time) demands the kind of painstaking choreography and period research we've never thought to expect from a filmmaker with such a notorious aversion to scripting and planning.
For all but the most hardcore chopsocky fans, the premise is yawn-inducing for its sheer redundancy. The life of 20th-century martial artist Ip Man-who became famous around the world as Bruce Lee's sifu-has already been brought to the screen with...