"The Grand Master" has been around for nearly four years from the start of filming to its final release today. In the face of Wong Kar-wai's age and prestige, four years can be a brew for sharpening a sword, and it is very likely to be procrastinated by itself (very contrary to the production laws of the film industry) and the attention of critics and audiences. I hope that it will become a "cheap and old" type of Waterloo. But Wong Kar Wai's name is a guarantee of a visual feast for literary audiences like me, and I'm still an absolute fan of him.
Sure enough, Wong Kar Wai did not disappoint. In this film, the visual aesthetics he still insists on reaches a new stage. The ingenious use of warm light sources, the clear grain effect brought by the large aperture lens, although the long lens is abandoned, the picture is extremely coherent, and each scene gives people a sense of coherence; and I don’t know how to shoot the grain Grains of rain that spread beautifully. In addition, the music that appears in more than 60% of the shots (the main melody is a moving string) maintains the high level of Wang's film music. I think the most exciting scene in the picture is the entire sparring scene between Ye Wen and Gong Er. Before, Ye Wen was invited by Gong Er to go to the Jinlou. The two were sitting at the table, and the picture seemed still at this moment. The dim, delicate and shady Chinese costumes, furniture and lighting radiated the most dazzling brilliance of Western oil paintings in the soundtrack of an opera aria (Godard attached body?!), and this aria clearly expresses the emotions of the two, and implies that the two will suppress their admiration for each other for half their lives. The martial arts scene at the beginning of the film is also very catchy to the audience. Although it is a group fight with one enemy and many people, the conversion and scheduling of shots and performances are extremely orderly and orderly, and it is not messy at all. It is hard to believe that this is a director. The first real martial arts film ("Dong Xie Xi Du" is not a martial arts theme throughout, so I don't think it is martial arts). On this point, Wong Kar-wai seems to have something in common with Ang Lee (although I dislike Ang Lee, but the reason I dislike him is simply because his works are terribly interpretable), maybe for the masters, Movies have no genre, only good and bad. Let me mention Zhang Yimou. At least in the field of vision, Master Zhang, who also pursues visual effects, is completely defeated. In front of such a film, the blown paper shop colored paper and church stained glass in "Jinling Thirteen Hairpins" appear Childish and ridiculous.
If the viewing of "The Grandmaster" only stays on the surface of the story, it may be considered that this is a somewhat failed film. First of all, the performance of the "Grandmaster" Ye Wen is too little, and it even makes people feel that it has not been realized as a complete story - not as good as Gong Er's story with a beginning and an end. And Tony Leung's role does not look as good as Zhang Ziyi's. (By the way, Zhang Ziyi finally showed some acting qualities in this film that she didn't have before, such as in inner scenes, and Wong Kar Wai made her very beautiful.) Second, Zhang Zhen's scenes were probably cut. A lot has been lost, except for two short-lived martial arts and two literary dramas, one sad and one happy, there is no trace of him in the film at all. The performance of Ip Man and his people basically jumped straight from 1940 to 1950, which is sure to be quite disappointing for viewers who were looking forward to seeing Ip Man fighting with traitors and Japanese like in the movie "Ip Man" .
But Wong Kar-wai is Wong Kar-wai who has filmed "In the Mood for Love" and "2046" after all. The significance of "The Grandmaster" in his film sequence is by no means a martial arts film, but must be part of his "Hong Kong narrative", otherwise the film There is absolutely no need to use about 40% of the entire film to show the lives of the protagonists after they arrived in Hong Kong. Although this part of the narrative is relatively quick, it is extremely important. When "The True Story" and "In the Mood for Love" represent Hong Kong in the 1960s, "Mong Kok Carmen" describes the 1980s, "Chongqing Forest" and "Fallen Angels" describe the 1990s, when "2046" imagines Into a future world and "Evil in the East" returned to the ancient desert (this film is a very complete metaphor for the social and political ecology of Hong Kong before the handover), "The Grandmaster" fills the Hong Kong in the world of Wong Kar-wai's images. fifties.
The expressions of the masters were never one-dimensional. Just as Antonioni adds a critique of the bourgeois way of life ("Passenger") when discussing the emptiness of life, just as Kieslowski also considers the opposition between East and West when he expresses the philosophical problem of the subject-object relationship of the soul The Cold War politics ("Veronica's Double Life"), Wong Kar-wai's film not only shows the martial arts and personalities of Ip Man and Gong Er, the history of Wing Chun, and the changes in Hong Kong's social life, but also touches on the The problem of "unification" in modern Chinese politics. Ip Man and Gong Er, one in the south and one in the north, one is based in Foshan, Guangdong, and the other is from the "Manchukuo" in the northeast, but they also ended up in Hong Kong. This combination of the southernmost and the northernmost is definitely not unintentional.
The important story in the first half of the film is that Mr. Gong Lao went to Guangdong to choose a southern boxer to take charge. The way he tested Ye Wen was to see if Ye Wen could break a cake in his hand. In Mr. Gong Lao's mind and the ideology he represents, "unification" is perfect; in a competition 20 years ago, Mr. Gong Lao was once judged by another boxer surnamed Ye, "The boxing is divided into north and south, and the country is also divided. I was moved by the ideal of "North and South", but when Ye Wen used boxing in a gentle way to break the cake that was still in the hands of Mr. Gong Lao, he said: "In your eyes, this cake is a martial arts. To me In terms of it, it is a world. The so-called great achievements are lacking, and there are defects in order to make progress."
"Defective"/"Incomplete" is the central idea of Wong Kar-wai's film. Hong Kong in the 1950s, as an isolated island outside the rule of the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, was itself incomplete. What if the story is incomplete? The Kuomintang agent played by Zhang Zhen lives in Hong Kong to open a barber shop, and he and his history are also incomplete. The "Manchukuo" in the north is even more incomplete. After Gong Er left Masan, who was knocked down by her on the platform of the train station, no one knew his end; Gong Er also came to Hong Kong and made a living by selling medicines. , leaving a broken life behind her decisively - her final farewell to Ye Wen was a gesture of self-mutilation. And Ye Wen's life is the biggest defect. After several jumps in the camera, we see that he insisted on his vow not to use martial arts as a signboard, and stood in front of the "Hong Kong and Kowloon Hotel General Union" sign with a group of apprentices (" The term “General Trade Union” evokes imagination). So Hong Kong in the 1950s, as a broken land, accepted these broken people.
This movie always reminds me that it has similarities with Stephen Chow's "Kung Fu", which is probably an analyzable metaphor for Hong Kong's history. The characters in "Kung Fu" are some people at the bottom who have been "crippled" on the surface, local people in Hong Kong, while Wang Jiawei's Ip Man is a "monstrous person" who has drifted here from other places and has a complete body and a long-dead spirit. This inevitably reminds us of Wong Kar Wai's Shanghainese background. As for whether this film is a commercial film or a literary film, or a film with commercial flavors that is inseparable from literary and artistic features, it is not important in the face of the film's complete narrative about "incompleteness".
January 8, 2013 in Beijing
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