The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai, 2013)

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

(With the U.S. release imminent, I figure I may as well post this long, messy piece I've assembled over the last few weeks, much of which unfortunately boils down to straightforward plot description with occasional interpolations—in other words, total spoilers within. This doesn't get much into the emotional aspects of the film--which I think colinr0380 handled very well in this post--nor does it address the formal aspects, which I'm not very good with but on which I think Michael Sicinski has written a short but insightful analysis. And bear in mind I have no idea what's changed in the U.S. cut, so for all I know it might render a good chunk of this totally inapplicable.)

There was a lot of cynicism when this film finally entered production, given that Donnie Yen and Wilson Yip had just done an Yip Man film, they were already filming a sequel, and Herman Yau was preparing his own cash-in film (The Legend Is Born). I wasn't too worried, since I didn't expect much overlap between Wong Kar-wai and Wilson Yip or Herman Yau. The problem turned out to be pretty much moot, since Wong spent so long in production that it put 2 1/2 years between his film and Yau's post-Ip Man 2 knockoff (which I actually liked, for the record). But Wong still brings a different spin to the material. The earlier Yip Man films were heavily defined by patriotic fervor. The filmmakers imagined Yip defending Chinese honor against foreign interlopers, giving him the same fictionalized patriot-hero treatment as Hong Fei-hung (from Once Upon a Time in China, soon to be rebooted) and Huo Yuanjia (from Fearless). Like its three predecessors, The Grandmaster doesn't try to present an "authentic" Yip Man; its plot is mostly fictitious and puts Yip alongside invented characters, though some are loosely based on real ones.

But the film not only lacks the patriotic bent of the earlier films, it all but disowns it. This is almost shocking in the context of contemporary Chinese commercial filmmaking, but the movie doesn't force the point. It comes out as part of Yip's broader and martial arts philosophy, which the film examines and reiterates from various angles, almost monomaniacally but never tiresomely. The success here is in Wong's ability to weave it into some of his favorite themes and story points, which come off much better here than in My Blueberry Nights (where he tried to adapt them to a low-key chick-flick mode so low-key that nothing registers). The strategy in The Grandmaster is to contrast Yip Man with various other "masters," a structure loosely comparable to the women of 2046 or the road-movie denizens of Nights. This accounts for the film's bold and unusual gambit: an "Yip Man movie" that doesn't, at first blush, seem to be much about Yip Man at all. (Herman Yau's fine Grandmaster cash-in The Final Fight employs a similar trick, but I'll set that aside for now.)

Yip is the focus at the outset—the rainy nighttime fight we saw so long ago that Wong Jing parodied it in a movie that came out nearly a year before The Grandmaster. Then Yip gives a précis of his life (in voice-over, natch): inherited wealth, no job in the usual sense, third-generation Wing Chun practitioner, a beautiful wife who speaks maybe three sentences in the whole movie ("she doesn't generally talk much"—understatement of the year). His Wing Chun doesn't seem to serve any obvious purpose. It's not explained who or why he's fighting in the opening scene, so the best assumption is that they're just a bunch of upstarts out to test his mettle—that handy plot device where knowing kung fu ensures people will always want you to use it. Yip takes satisfaction from his skills, allowing Leung to display that insouciant air he does so well, but other than that, and some vague phrases like "One's belt is one's honor," nothing immediately evident lies behind Yip's martial-arts practice.

The first of the contrasting masters is the retiring Gong Yutian (Wang Qingxiang, a reliable stentorian actor), who comes from the north for one last meet-and-greet with his southern colleagues. Gong has dedicated his life to spreading northern martial arts throughout the country, and hopes northern and southern styles can be merged into one. This evokes the old notion of northern order brought to the south, to the traditional site of bandits, triads, pirates, and rebellions; the political dimension of his project is confirmed by his introductory speech, in which he recounts meeting with Kuomintang bigwig Li Jishen to send the "Five Tigers down south" (a real incident, the "Tigers" being a quintet of northern masters) and establish the state-sponsored Guangdong-Guangxi Martial Arts Academy (a real institution). The film doesn't mention that the Academy shut down after four months because of KMT infighting, and Gong's dream of unity sounds even more distant (if not naive) after meeting with a northeastern colleague (Zhao Benshan, of Happy Times and Getting Home), who speaks darkly of Japanese incursions in the north and potential secession in the south. Gong's mission comes off like rearranging chairs on the Titanic, attempting to unify the Chinese martial-arts community (the wulin) while China itself falls apart.

Yip comes in when Gong challenges the southerners to an exhibition match, and they choose Yip as their champion. He makes his way through a couple of subordinates (including a woman with bound feet), then faces Gong in the oddest "fight" scene in recent memory. Gong holds a cookie in an outstretched arm and challenges Yip to break it. Yip prevails, but his victory is more rhetorical than physical. Yip objects to Gong Yutian's focus on the wulin and argues this limits his vision: "In your eyes, this cookie is a wulin; to me, it's an entire world." Yip rejects the idea of martial arts as an enclosed community, manifested as real and mythical secret societies. Virtually all Chinese martial arts—northern and southern, Wing Chun included—claim descent from the legendary "Elders" who supposedly survived the destruction of the (or a) Shaolin Temple, then went underground to escape the Qing authorities. The same origin was often claimed by the various Tiandihui and Hongmen organizations ancestral to the Kuomintang. Gong Yutian yokes himself to this insular tradition, cutting backroom deals with the KMT and focusing on unification of the existing wulin. Yip speaks of greater ambitions ("the world is more than north and south...the southern arts can go beyond the north"), but for the time being, these remain rhetorical.

An even more explicit rejection of the secret-society mentality comes from another "master," nicknamed "Razor" in the English subtitles. Razor is played by Chang Chen in a seemingly standalone subplot—except for a brief, wordless encounter with Zhang Ziyi (two brief, wordless encounters in the international version), he never intersects with any of the other major characters, and his presence in the finished film likely owes something to contractual obligation. But though Razor and Yip never share a scene together [EDIT: apparently not true in the U.S. version], Wong goes out of his way to pair the two, giving Razor a rain-drenched fight scene that blatantly echoes the opening one with Yip. The identical setting sharpens the contrast between Yip's Wing Chun and Razor's Bajiquan: Razor constantly pushes forward with short, "explosive" strikes, while Yip holds his ground with sweeping omnidirectional attacks.

But Razor shares Yip's rejection of the wulin, as the fight breaks out when Razor—part of a gang of KMT assassins—insists on leaving the organization. The film is neutral on martial arts in service of the state, at least during a time of crisis, but it's plainly skeptical about its effectiveness. Movies like Legend of the Fist or the Taichi diptych show kung fu holding its own against 20th-century mechanized armies. The Grandmaster shows "Uncle Deng" (one of Yip's circle) angrily declaring "I'll kill every Jap that comes!", then cuts to a caption: "Uncle Deng died in a Japanese bombing." That brutally puts paid to any question of kung fu affecting the course of the war—Wing Chun or Bajiquan aren't much help against a Mitsubishi G3M.

In any event, the war is over the Razor wants out. He succeeds and opens a barbershop in Hong Kong, where he bickers over a kickback. It's a tense scene, but there's something off about it: the conversation feels like a mere pretext for the physical contest that inevitably breaks out. The pantomime quality is enhanced by the presence of Xiao Shenyang, an unsubtle comedian (protege of Zhao Benshan) who shamelessly mugs for the camera just before Razor slams him across the room. Shenyang obviously isn't one to hold a grudge, since he immediately asks Razor to take him as a disciple. Razor reluctantly agrees, and a caption summarizes his achievement: "Bajiquan entered Hong Kong." Razor discards the organization, but his potential is only fulfilled when he discards its secretive, proprietary approach to martial arts and begins spreading his art in an region where it was heretofore unknown—precisely as Yip does with Wing Chun in Hong Kong.

The most important contrasting master, or at least the one who takes up the bulk of the film's attention, is Gong Yutian's daughter Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi). Gong Er herself is paired with a rival, her father's heir Ma San (Zhang Jin). Ma regards martial ability as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement: he tries to take on the assembled southern masters with no prompting, he objects to Gong Yutian's characterization of martial arts as "a sword you keep in its sheath," and Gong Yutian finally kicks him out of Foshan until he grows up. He ends up throwing in with the Japanese, and while it's not explained what the Japanese get out of this, Ma plainly revels in the VIP treatment. He pays a last visit to Gong Yutian, who disowns him before being apparently killed by Ma—though it's left ambiguous whether his death is accidental or deliberate.

Much of the film's middle section is take up by Gong Er's mission of revenge against Ma San. It's repeatedly emphasized that this is a self-imposed mission, as Gong Yutian supposedly told her with his last words not to do so. (This is also ambiguous, though, since it's only relayed second-hand by older members of Gong Yutian's circle, not heard directly by Gong Er or the audience.) One elder even unsuccessfully counsels Gong Er to team up with Ma and "complete" the Gong family's martial arts—to not only forgive Ma San but to expand her conception of family to include the "brother-master" who killed her father. (Remarkably, nobody seems bothered that Ma is also a collaborator, leading me to wonder if this plot turn was only included to provide a more clearly demarcated villain.) Yip and the Razor spread their art, the Gong family's martial arts is reduced to a one-on-one competition for "the Gong family legacy" that Gong Er, in the revenge-story tradition, only wins at great cost to herself. She's badly and permanently injured, she gets hooked on opium, she takes on a ghostly white pallor, and indeed she's the only character who displays physical changes in the course of the film, even though it unfolds over a 25-year period.

There's something schematic about the Gong Er/Ma San relationship, a feeling reinforced by the numbered nicknames given to them by Gong Yutian: "er" = 2, "san" = 3. Coincidentally or not, their numerical ranking corresponds to the inclusiveness of their martial-arts philosophy. Gong Yutian, the presumptive #1, sees martial arts as property of the wulin; Gong Er, as property of the family; Ma San, as property of the individual. (I suppose Ma San should really be "one," but Gong Yutian explains the "three" as a reference to "an old wulin expression" prescribing modesty.) Gong Er's committment to patrimony is only slightly less insular than Ma's self-glorification, compelling her to abandon her pending marriage and her study of medicine (a classically "selfless" vocation) for the sake of avenging her father. It also means witholding her family's trademark technique—"the Gong Family's 64 Hands"—that her father taught to no one else, Ma San included.

Yip and Gong Er struggle to keep their relationship at a platonic remove, much like the couple of In the Mood for Love. In some respects their relationship also echoes the Leung/Zhang duo in 2046 or Chang Chen and Gong Li in "The Hand," where the characters' failures to follow through on their emotions produce similar consequences for the female leads. Only in the last act does Gong Er finally announce her feelings for Yip, in a faux-casual way ("It's nothing to tell you this") that still tries to minimize them. Yip asks to see the 64 Hands again, but she no longers remember it. Her descent into illness and opium doom the Gong family's biological line, and her attenuated relationship with Yip combines with her traditional notions of inheritance to doom the Gong family's martial-arts legacy. Thus Wong refashions a favorite theme for a new kung-fu context.

The Gong Er story falls into a sort of wasted-woman trope, but Gong Er's failure doesn't automatically mark her as weaker or inferior to Yip, just as a victim of circumstance. Yip loses part of his family to war-induced privations and the rest when the Hong Kong-mainland border is closed. (His two sons eventually joined him in Hong Kong, but only after the period covered in the film.) Yip chooses to open a school and spread his art openly, a more expansive substitute for the Gong-style martial-arts family he can no longer have. But if Yip had lost his family to a martial-arts rival instead of impersonal historical forces, can we definitely say he wouldn't be consumed by revenge just as Gong Er was?

With no need to seek revenge for the fate of his family, the exiled Yip effectively starts all over again, encapsulated in a scene where some macho tough guys take Yip to task—remember, this is the man who was not long ago acclaimed as the pride of southern martial arts—because Wing Chun doesn't mean shit in Hong Kong. Yip's life is one of discontinuities, both personal and historical-political. In the course of the film, he loses his wealth, his family, and his hometown. As for the bigger picture, an early flashback (moved to the end in the international version) has Yip's master (a cameo by Yuen Wo-ping) break out the "One's belt is one's honor" line, after which Yip's voice-over divides his life into historical eras: "I lived through the Guangxu Emperor, the Xuantong Emperor, the Republic, the Northern Expedition, the Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War..." He then refers back to his master's words with a line that gains significance only in retrospect: "I could perservere with this sentence."

I don't believe we ever get much of an idea of what Yip and his master mean by "honor," but I think the "belt" is actually more significant—a link to the past that is never taken from him, even after he loses everything else. (The English subtitles on the Hong Kong Blu-ray have a line here that doesn't reflect the actual dialogue, and that makes the point much more explicit: "One sash, an unbroken tradition.") Yip will always be, in his master's formal words, "a practioner of the martial arts," regardless of his family or financial situation, and Yip understands that martial arts go anywhere, whether he's under imperial rule, a disunited republic, a foreign occupation, or a British colonial government. (The film takes special care to remind us that this is exactly what Hong Kong was, with a shot of Yip having his ID photo taken before a height chart in feet and inches, and with newsreel footage of Hong Kong marking Elizabeth II's coronation.) Having lost everything, Yip reinvents himself as a selfless carrier of tradition. If Gong Er's fate has echoes of Bai Ling's in 2046, Yip's has its own echoes of Chow Mo-wan, who ends up in some indeterminate, self-constructed mix of past and future—the distinction being that Yip's synthesis (the conveyance of the past to the future) comes as a triumph.

Yip's triumph, then, is his defense of tradition. This is a rather conservative point of view, but it's made clear that tradition survives a time of upheaval—personal or political—only by becoming more inclusive. (Consider that Gong Er may well have lived to pass down her art had she been her father's heir instead of Ma San, an impossibility in the patriarchal wulin.) Here we may find an explanation for the film's cryptic bookends: Yip's claim that "kung fu" is composed of "one horizontal, one vertical." This somewhat untranslatable statement is based on the shape of the characters for "kung" (功) and "fu" (夫); at the film's outset, Yip explains this as a crude metaphor for combat, where only the victor is left standing. He doesn't explain why he repeats it at the film's conclusion, but he clearly means something different here. I imagine it as the stability of tradition (the vertical) standing alongside the sweeping "horizontality" of time and space, no longer symbolizing combat but Yip's own achievement. Yip's mastery is to convey tradition through both time and space, transcending family, north-south and, eventually, China itself. (The international version even adds some brief footage of Yip sparring with a "westerner," which may have been intended as pandering gesture but affirms Yip's committment to openness.) Even his wardrobe signals a dual allegiance to tradition and the outside world: though he looks ill at ease wearing a Western-style suit for his ID photo (the same garb Leung wore so well in his last two WKW films), he spends much of the film in a Chinese-style robe topped off by a very non-Chinese Panama hat. And Yip's family background isn't in martial arts but in the import-export business, taking Chinese products to the world and vice-versa—perhaps this influences the "open-door" approach to his art.

Whatever the reasons for Yip's outward vision—and again, it would seem pure cicumstance has a lot to do with it—the film's final caption confirms that this was the root of his success: "Because of him, Wing Chun flourished and spread throughout the world." A comparison that comes to mind is Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Go Master, about a man who lives through the same messy historical backdrop, relocates to Japan to perfect his art, passes through various insular milieus, and finally achieves immortality by passing his skill down to others. This comparison occurred to me even before I discovered that one of Wong's co-writers, Zou Jingzhi, was also a co-writer on The Go Master, or (less significantly) that Tian Zhuangzhuang did the Mandarin dubbing for Yip's master. (Chang Chen's part in The Grandmaster is too minor to make much of a comparison with his lead role in The Go Master, but broadly speaking, both characters follow a similar path.)

The Go Master certainly seems a stronger parallel than the Donnie Yen Ip Man cycle. The ending of Ip Man 2 nicely sums up the differences: its closing text starts off similarly—"For 22 years, Yip Man spread the seeds of Wing Chun around the world"—but has an added kicker in extra-large characters: "...for the glory of Chinese martial arts." Donnie Yen's Yip is still stuck in the wulin, where Wing Chun might be taught to (certain) foreigners but never transcends its origins. Contrast with Leung's Yip, who asserts that "martial arts belong to the datong." The datong is a Confucian ideal (literally "great unity") that can be imagined as a utopia free from class, national, and (in some radical versions) even familial boundaries. In Ip Man 1 we get the exact opposite, as Yip proclaims the Japanese "will never understand" Chinese martial arts. So much for the datong...

The Grandmaster sees the wulin as something to move beyond, or at least to expand and re-define as a metaphor for borderless, all-inclusive utopia. Central to this metaphor is the seemingly paradoxical idea of non-proprietary tradition—that Chinese martial arts, pace Donnie Yen or Gong Yutian, can go anywhere, be understood by anyone, and have no need for "unification," being just some of "a thousand styles returning to the same road" (to use Yip's nicely pluralistic phrasing). So perhaps the film's real radicalism isn't in its resistance to nationalist narratives, but in its modest treatment of martial arts, which has become vanishingly rare as kung-fu films are reduced to infrequent event pictures. Yip's art isn't a real-life superpower, a world-changing force, or a summation and stand-in for the whole Chinese nation, but a benign tradition whose greatest value lies in its own perpetuation.

[zedz]

Magnificent write-up! If that's a mere "straightforward plot description," then I'd love to see more of them. I really appreciate all the historical background you made explicit.

So we're now up to four distinct versions of the film, right?
- Original Chinese theatrical cut (130 mins)
- Chinese BD / DVD cut with tweaked soundtrack (130 mins)
- International / festival cut, reordered and re-edited (122 mins)
- US theatrical cut, re-reordered, re-re-edited, with some footage not in any other version (108 mins)

Was there any unique footage in the "international" cut? Assuming that gets released on disc in one of the territories where it was released theatrically, we might end up with all three edits available on BluRay.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Thanks for the compliments. The Shelly Kracier piece mentioned in Sicinski's review is also useful for historical context, if you haven't seen that one already.

Was there any unique footage in the "international" cut? Assuming that gets released on disc in one of the territories where it was released theatrically, we might end up with all three edits available on BluRay.

Some of this footage is probably in the U.S. version as well, but compared with the Chinese cut(s), the international cut adds another scene with Gong Er and Razor—they enter the same restaurant in Hong Kong but don't acknowledge each other. It also has a longer version of Gong Er's final flashback and adds more footage of the little boy (Bruce Lee) to the last scene. The changes extend all the way to the closing credits, which are intercut with scenes of Yip sparring with various partners (including the "westerner" I mentioned in my previous post). The French Blu/DVD comes out next month and will probably use this cut, since that's what was shown in theaters there.

(The 144-minute runtime on Amazon.fr is surely an error or a misunderstanding, since that's more than ten minutes longer than even the Chinese version and there's no mention in the specs of an "extended cut" or anything like that. The Wide Side website gives the runtime as 122 minutes, i.e. the international version. Perhaps Amazon is counting the "scéne inédite en 3D Active" as part of the running time, though I have no idea what that's supposed to be—Wong actually considered converting the film to 3D, so maybe this was a test sequence? It would have to be an awfully long scene to bring the film up to 144 minutes. The DVD-only release is missing that feature and has a listed runtime of 117 minutes, which corresponds to the international cut with PAL speedup.)

[colinr0380]

That is a very insightful post Fanciful, and it provides a lot of extra detail to help appreciate the themes of the film.

The Grandmaster sees the wulin as something to move beyond, or at least to expand and re-define as a metaphor for borderless, all-inclusive utopia. Central to this metaphor is the seemingly paradoxical idea of non-proprietary tradition—that Chinese martial arts, pace Donnie Yen or Gong Yutian, can go anywhere, be understood by anyone, and have no need for "unification," being just some of "a thousand styles returning to the same road" (to use Yip's nicely pluralistic phrasing). So perhaps the film's real radicalism isn't in its resistance to nationalist narratives, but in its modest treatment of martial arts, which has become vanishingly rare as kung-fu films are reduced to infrequent event pictures. Yip's art isn't a real-life superpower, a world-changing force, or a summation and stand-in for the whole Chinese nation, but a benign tradition whose greatest value lies in its own perpetuation.

In a way this adds to the final tragedy of the film, as Ip Man is left to spread that art beyond boundaries, and we have followed a close knit community bound together by their practice of kung fu in all of its forms. Yet the wider world beyond still destroys (as illustrated in your point about the blunt intertitle describing Uncle Deng's death in a bombing raid and the occupation of the brothel by the Japanese straight after his defiant statements) and Ip Man is kind of 'trapped' in Hong Kong at the end of the film once the borders are closed with the mainland in the 50s, never to see his wife again before her death.

He has his professional life as a kind of compensation for that, yet he is kind of in exile from his homeland and cut off from family and the outside world, much as Gong Er had to cut herself off and give up her marriage (in a moment of handing the ring over to a silhouetted, abstract figure of a husband that seems to echo those wraith-like shots of the veiled adulterous couple in In The Mood For Love) to dedicate herself to vengeance and reclaim her right to her family name.

There is the sense that, while the wulin may expand beyond groups, regions and national borders, it is still powerless in the face of the larger historical forces that buffet the individual around. Much as Gong Er recognises that there is not going to be a good outcome for her or her family name in pursuing vengeance but is unable to change from that course of action as the only honourable one open to her.

In that sense I think The Grandmaster is also quite a political film, although it is more political for the time in which this film is being released rather than for anything explicit in the film itself. The film seems to suggests to me at least that there is constant change in society but it comes at such an excrutiatingly, glacially slow pace that individual human beings cannot wait for that change to save them in the short to medium term (and even if you are lucky enough to have a political or cultural change 'save' you, it is quite likely that it will have caused damage and upheaval to others in its turn). If you are looking to wait out political change or war for something better to come along you will more than likely never see that change come, so you have to come to terms with the limitations that it places on you (which is where I sense the feeling of melancholy but acceptance on display by Ip Man in the final sequence), yet the mere presence of this film now, a Hong Kong/China co-production filmed on the mainland, stands kind of as its own testament to that final metaphor of expanding and sharing your philosophy as widely as possible.

Perhaps this in turn all goes back to that initial statement by Gong Yuitan as he is retiring at the beginning of the film about the necessity of trying to create circumstances for the younger generation to hopefully successfully build further upon after you are gone (even if his plans go badly awry due to Ma Sen and the passing over of Gong Er, or rather her father's seeming attempt to move Gong Er out of the 'family business' despite her obvious deep interest and involvement with it).

[Rupert Pupkin]

yes great review indeed!

Magnificent write-up! If that's a mere "straightforward plot description," then I'd love to see more of them. I really appreciate all the historical background you made explicit.

So we're now up to four distinct versions of the film, right?
- Original Chinese theatrical cut (130 mins)
- Chinese BD / DVD cut with tweaked soundtrack (130 mins)
- International / festival cut, reordered and re-edited (122 mins)
- US theatrical cut, re-reordered, re-re-edited, with some footage not in any other version (108 mins)

Was there any unique footage in the "international" cut? Assuming that gets released on disc in one of the territories where it was released theatrically, we might end up with all three edits available on BluRay.

I have a technical question too...
I live in France, I will go to the French Blu-Ray by Wild Side (despite the fact that many BR are disappointed in France (1080i....) I still have some trust in W.Side nevertheless... )
they say it will include a 3D active scene. Is it an outtake ? too bad that it isn't included in the cut of the movie. Do you think it could be seen with some no-3D compatible material ? (I have a videoprojector with a standard/common blu-ray stand-alone player which can not play 3D active material)
but generally the 3D active blu-ray let you watch the movie in "classic" 2D mode (see for instance "Dial M For Murder")
do you think it was a pre-FX scene ? (with background not finished, etc...)

I've downloaded the HK cut. I wanted to order it on Yesasia but was annoyed by the review on the blu-ray.com forum...
most of the buyers of this blu-ray HK are happy to see this cut, and this movie, but were really disappointed with the picture quality (some compression artefacts...etc...)
Is there a Japanese Blu-Ray from the same cut ???

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Japanese theaters got the same international cut that Europe did, so I imagine the eventual Japanese BD will be the same cut as well. I'd like to be wrong, but I think the HK Blu will be the only release of the Chinese cut.

As for the 3D scene, I've looked around for info but haven't found anything beyond what's on Amazon and Wild Side's website. Amazon says it's "inédite" (unreleased) and Wild Side says it's "exclusive." "Exclusive" sounds very different to me from "unreleased," since "exclusive" could just mean Wild Side has the only 3D version of the scene—in other words, a 2D version might exist elsewhere. I'm guessing we won't know until the disc comes out, or at least until reviews start popping up.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

A lengthy article on the changes made for the U.S. release. The writer is very critical and it's hard to blame him—I assumed from the start that Chang Chen's role would be cut to the bone, but hacking up Zhang Ziyi's role on top of that is just ridiculous.

[colinr0380]

Gosh, that sounds radically restructured. If those changes are correct I see what they mean about streamlining the action now with all of the complicated multiple character bits surrounding the main story gone such as Ip Man's wife (who does disappear from the narrative after she leaves with the children at the beginning of the film in order to let Ip Man fight his contest, but who should always be present in the audience's mind through the unrequited love story with Gong Er, and finally devastate us with the 'trapped in Hong Kong' ending)

Also it sounds as if Gong Er is made much less interestingly complicated, in the sense that in the 130 minute cut I see a lot of parallels between her character feeling it necessary to challenge Ip Man after her father's defeat by him, something which beautifully makes her single mindedness equivalent to Ma San's, foreshadowing her final commitment to vengeance. It is just that she knows when to stop, or admit defeat without admitting defeat, while Ma San crosses the line. Gong Er and Ma San are two dualistic characters as much as Ip Man and The Razor are also equivalently matched, each illuminating the other through their mere presence, and it sound as if those doubling characters are what is being lost in the 108 minute version.

(Although The Razor is much more than just a companion to Ip Man, despite that being his main function. The Razor's character, rather aptly, is cut down even in the 130 minute version, but on re-watching a couple of nights ago I think that role is just as crucial as the others in the film in the way that his character is the 'dark shadow' illustrating the alternate paths the main characters could have travelled, from paralleling Ip Man's journey to Hong Kong and setting up another form of martial arts (albeit more reluctantly than Ip Man did), to the tentative meeting between Gong Er and himself on the train in which she saves his life through inaction, to acting as a contrast to Ma San's Japanese collaborator by being a collaborator himself who leaves the organisation, in a fight that is the violent, bone crunching and bloody antithesis to both Ip Man's and Gong Er's balletic, forceful but bloodless fights)

[zedz]

That sounds terrible, and terribly wrong-headed. I view Gong Er as the functional lead of the original film, since Ip Man's role becomes increasingly passive as the film progresses. And do I have it correct that in the American cut Gong Er is training after her fight with Ma Sun? What on earth is she training for? And it seems that Ip Man's wife is almost completely removed from the film. Compounded with the weakening of the Gong Er story, that would seem to completely rip out the melancholy emotional guts of the film. I can only imagine that in this version of the film Ip seems vapidly morose and infuriatingly inactive!

I was resigned to Chang Chen's marginal character being lost, but his scenes are some of my favourites in the film. He's there to offer multiple counterpoint to the other characters, but if the film is stripped of subtext even that would be unnecessary.

[feihong]

I could have used a lot more of Chang Chen in the Hong Kong cut, really. Every scene with him seemed supercharged, and the counterpoint he offers, just as you say, made the film much richer. As it was in the Hong Kong cut, I felt I had to treat him a little the way one treats the Tony Leung character appearing at the end of Days of Being Wild––as an indicator of a lifestyle, a contrast, a suggestion that the ethos of an idea continues on after the particular characters of the story are dead (Tony suggests there will still be flippant young womanizers in Hong Kong after Leslie's character is gone, and Chang Chen suggests that there will still be people trying to make a name for themselves with kung fu after Yip man and his generation have gone).

And just as you say, zedz, in the Hong Kong cut it feels as if Gong Er is the co-star of the story. I would go farther and say that to me she seemed to be the star of the film--the agent of the most conflict, the primary actor in the film. It seemed as if Yip was largely watching her progress more than doing his own thing (and why not? The plural title the film had for a while seems more appropriate to the movie than the singular). So the Weinsteins didn't see that? Wong didn't see that? They all felt fine with diminishing Gong Er's story? It seems really strange, because Gong Er's story is the sturdy throughline that keeps the narrative going as the film moves on.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

That sounds terrible, and terribly wrong-headed. I view Gong Er as the functional lead of the original film, since Ip Man's role becomes increasingly passive as the film progresses. And do I have it correct that in the American cut Gong Er is training after her fight with Ma Sun? What on earth is she training for?

I'm pretty sure that refers to the flashback at the end of her story, where she's shown practicing in the snow. The international versions expand it to include a conversation with her father (which, as the Film.com writer notes, is a rather perverse choice for the U.S. version, where Gong Er's role has otherwise been reduced).

[jbeall]

Very much looking forward to seeing this, and hoping it comes to a nearby cinema so I don't have to wait until netflix/redbox has it. I was struck by this line in the NY Times review:

When Ip Man slyly asks “What’s your style?” it’s clear that Mr. Wong is asking the same question because here, as in his other films, style isn’t reducible to ravishing surfaces; it’s an expression of meaning.

because (for me, anyway), it explains why I love WKW films but why I thought Only God Forgives was pretty to look at but utter crap. But I'm not here to troll the thread by ripping on Refn. The last paragraph of Dargis's review touches on the difference between the original release and the domestic one; Dargis still thinks the domestic release is well worth seeing (she hasn't seen the original cut).

[Zot!]

There's a WKW interview where he mentions that the US cut is contractially obligated to come in under 2 hours, and he made a decision to make it different rather than simply shorter, as the original cut for him is very exacting. I don't think he makes mention of the 3rd cut.

[FakeBonanza]

The US cut is good for everything that Wong filmed. In fact, what remain's a Wong's film is truly stunning. That being said, many of the alterations in this cut (the intertitles, the voiceover narration) were obvious even to someone who was not aware of the specifics (though I was aware that it had been cut). I also was not surprised to learn that Chang Chen's character had a larger role in Wong's cut. He was introduced as a dynamic character, yet only appeared in one scene. It was difficult to constantly be reminded that the film I was viewing was a hatchet job. Despite this, the power of Wong's images was not lost, and I still enjoyed the film. Even so, the film's most overwhelming effect is to leave me with a desire to view the Chinese cut.

Regarding Gong Er: Even though her role seems to have been reduced in the American cut, it still seemed clear to me that she is the film's functional lead. What the Weinsteins seem to have done, at the expense of coherence, is edit the film so that, structurally, it is more balanced between Ip Man and Gong Er.

Spoiler

the narrative appears to conclude with the final meeting between Ip and Gong, yet the Weinsteins have moved the young Ip flashback to the end of the film (rather than the beginning) in an attempt to punctuate Ip Man's narrative as one distinct from his relationship with Gong.

[colinr0380]

You don’t learn the names of Ip Man’s children, yet you do learn those of his martial arts adversaries, the good, bad and ugly who stand in for a divided China.

I love that Dargis has managed to find a third Sergio Leone film that is being referenced here!

[jindianajonz]

So is there any precedent of the Weinsteins releasing multiple cuts of films on Blu-ray that would give me hope of seeing an English friendly region 1 release of the international cut?

[zedz]

So is there any precedent of the Weinsteins releasing multiple cuts of films on Blu-ray that would give me hope of seeing an English friendly region 1 release of the international cut?

Hang on a minute, I'll just give Chen Kaige a call and ask him how that worked out with Temptress Moon.

EDIT: I would strongly advise anybody interested in seeing the complete film to pick up the Hong Kong Blu before it goes OOP. There's also a Taiwanese edition that seems to contain the same cut, but I can't confirm that. Considering the fate of a lot of variant versions, particularly where the Weinsteins are involved, I regard the availability of this version on DVD / Blu as a fluke.

[Shrew]

Well, Temptress Moon was from before the period when an existing extra cut could be marketed as a bonus DVD feature. And Miramax did release the Chinese version of Shaolin Soccer with the awful U.S. cut on DVD.

However, getting 3 cuts on one release from the Weinsteins is as likely as Obama 2016. I could see the international cut being sold either with the U.S. cut, or in a separate release, but I'm thinking the Chinese release might stay Chinese.

[jindianajonz]

EDIT: I would strongly advise anybody interested in seeing the complete film to pick up the Hong Kong Blu before it goes OOP. There's also a Taiwanese edition that seems to contain the same cut, but I can't confirm that. Considering the fate of a lot of variant versions, particularly where the Weinsteins are involved, I regard the availability of this version on DVD / Blu as a fluke.

Thank you! Any recommendations on where I can get it, living in the US? I haven't gone region free yet, but this is giving me my strongest desire yet to go for it!

EDIT: Amazon has them

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I thought the Miramax DVD of Temptress Moon was the original version? The listed runtime is 127 minutes, same as the Cannes cut. The U.S. theatrical release was around 115 minutes. Miramax also recut Farewell My Concubine before releasing the original version on DVD, so it wouldn't be the only time they did something like that (though only Concubine was explicitly advertised as a director's cut).

[zedz]

EDIT: I would strongly advise anybody interested in seeing the complete film to pick up the Hong Kong Blu before it goes OOP. There's also a Taiwanese edition that seems to contain the same cut, but I can't confirm that. Considering the fate of a lot of variant versions, particularly where the Weinsteins are involved, I regard the availability of this version on DVD / Blu as a fluke.

Thank you! Any recommendations on where I can get it, living in the US? I haven't gone region free yet, but this is giving me my strongest desire yet to go for it!

EDIT: Amazon has them

Yesasia is very reliable, and handily collects the releases from various countries, so you can mix and match with Korean and (if you won the lottery) Japanese discs. International shipping is usually free for orders over a modest amount. I'm pretty sure the WKW disc alone would qualify.

[Finch]

try dddhouse.com as well. they may even be cheaper than YesAsia.

[whaleallright]

I'm not completely clear on whether Weinstein had a strong hand in making the changes that resulted in the US release version, or if the Weinstein Company had contracted for a 2-hour cut and Wong made the changes on his own.

If the Weinsteins did have a lot of say in the recut, it seems like a rather futile gesture since they don't seem to have a sound release strategy. From the looks of things, they are opening The Grandmaster in mainstream multiplexes. The plan is to get it onto 800 screens, certainly no tentpole release, but huge compared to the US openings of Wong's other films.

They've largely skipped the so-called "smart houses" (hybrid mainstream multiplex/art cinemas) and the art/indie/niche cinemas. But standard multiplexes are not going to effectively market the film to those audiences who would be most curious about it. After all, none of the stars are genuine box-office draws in the States, meaning folks who just walk in looking for something to see are probably going to pass it up. To the extent that the martial-arts genre has its own dedicated audience, it's one more likely to rent or buy the film on home video (and some of those fans will probably be disappointed in Wong's take on a wu xia anyway). So really it's Wong's reputation that could sell the film, and that's largely an art-house reputation. The closest thing to a success that Wong has had stateside, In the Mood for Love, was perhaps his artsiest to that point (at least in its minimalism and languid pacing), and its $3 million US gross was almost entirely in art houses (widest release was 74 screens).

Which is all to say, the Weinstein Company's strategy of sneaking this into multiplexes (who will no doubt replace it with some franchise or star vehicle after a week or two) seems like a bad one, tantamount to dumping the film. They've done this sort of thing before. Why bother urging or making so many changes when the marketing/release strategy seems likely consign The Grandmaster to the same kind of near-invisibly as 2046?

(To make this even more confusing, Wong's film debuted in my city at a multiplex, where it played three days. Then it was withdrawn, reworked for Atmos, and on Friday it re-opens in that format, in a single theater in a large multiplex that is equipped for Atmos. The first part of this article--which appears to be a reprinted press release-- discusses the film's mixing and release for Atmos.)

[MichaelB]

If the Weinsteins did have a lot of say in the recut, it seems like a rather futile gesture since they don't seem to have a sound release strategy. From the looks of things, they are opening The Grandmaster in mainstream multiplexes. The plan is to get it onto 800 screens, certainly no tentpole release, but huge compared to the US openings of Wong's other films.

They've largely skipped the so-called "smart houses" (hybrid mainstream multiplex/art cinemas) and the art/indie/niche cinemas. But standard multiplexes are not going to effectively market the film to those audiences who would be most curious about it. After all, none of the stars are genuine box-office draws in the States, meaning folks who just walk in looking for something to see are probably going to pass it up. To the extent that the martial-arts genre has its own dedicated audience, it's one more likely to rent or buy the film on home video (and some of those fans will probably be disappointed in Wong's take on a wu xia anyway). So really it's Wong's reputation that could sell the film, and that's largely an art-house reputation. The closest thing to a success that Wong has had stateside, In the Mood for Love, was perhaps his artsiest to that point (at least in its minimalism and languid pacing), and its $3 million US gross was almost entirely in art houses (widest release was 74 screens).

I think Wong's other films are a complete red herring here - if you sell it as a Wong Kar-wai film, you're essentially condemning it to an arthouse ghetto from the start, and this clearly has far more crossover potential than 2046.

So my guess is that Weinstein is far more interested in the prospect (realistic or no) of aiming for the success of Zhang Yimou's Hero, which was number one at the US box office in its opening week (2,031 screens) and went on to gross $53 million. Since Miramax handled that film's distribution, Weinstein will be privy to all the relevant figures.

[colinr0380]

They're also using an RZA soundtrack in some trailers, the chap who did music for Kill Bill Vol 1, Django Unchained and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, along with recently directing his own martial arts themed film The Man With The Iron Fists ("it puts the F.U. in Kung Fu"!), so that seems to be the demographic that is being targeted here. Which could work either way, though I wonder whether people drawn in by the marketing will be disappointed at the longeurs between fight scenes when that trailer appears to be promising wall-to-wall action.

I'd have perhaps gone down the route of playing up the Sergio Leone parallels myself.