一代宗师 英文影评

Review of “The Grandmaster”

It’s more than fair to say that Wong Kar-wai’s movies are not easy to understand. The Hong Kong director rarely focuses on narratives in his works. Yet, he is undeniably an excellent storyteller who always feeds audiences with a visual and emotional feast.

His latest movie, “The Grandmaster”, which chronicles the life of the Wing Chun grandmaster Ip Man from the 1930s in Foshan, his flight to Hong Kong during the Second Sino-Japanese War,and the events leading to his death. It is another of Wong’s typical movie: light on narrative, but full of his trademark elegance, the movie weaves the director’s familiar themes of love, loss and the corrosive nature of time around gorgeous martial arts sequences.

Fight scenes in a martial arts movie are like song-and-dance numbers in a musical: After certain amount of dialogue, you are ready for one. The choreography of the action scenes in “The Grandmaster”was designed by Yuen Wo-Ping, whose credits include “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”and who understands that form is more important than function.

There’s also a competition to find unlikely settings for martial arts scenes. In “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” Lee gives us a scene of startling daring, when two protagonists cling to the tops of fall, swaying trees and swing back and forth during a sword fight. In “The Grandmaster,”many of the kung-fu scenes are set in beautifully furnished parlor rooms that suggest the quiet intensity of a high-stakes chess game, but one in which the threats could mean life or death. Such as Gong Er(Zhang Ziyi)’s challenging Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) to regain her family's honor in Golden Building, and they agree that if anything breaks, Ip loses. "Kung Fu is about precision." It becomes clear that Mr. Wong is showing his audience that kung fu is not only a sport of strength superiority but an intellectual pursuit.

“The Grandmaster” takes place mainly from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, a turbulent time in China's history, but one that the film doesn't dwell on, and focuses on Ip Man(Tony Leung Chiu-wai)'s marriage to his wife Cheung Wing-sing(Song Hye Kyo) and his tentative friendship with Gong Er(Zhang Ziyi). Ip loves his wife deeply and try his best to please her. Regardless of the rumor, he takes Cheung out to the Golden Building just because she loves opera. What about the relationship between Ip and Gong? Until their final meet, we get something. Gong said, “Mr. Ip, you’ve in my heart.”We can’t confirm that she loved him. Maybe, in some degrees, Gong to Ip is not so much a competitor as a confidante.

Wong is a fan of recurring themes and “The Grandmaster”is no