The Grandmaster: how Wong Kar-wai’s martial arts epic captured the essence of Chinese culture and history
- Film shows with precision the different martial arts styles, with choreography by The Matrix’s Yuen Woo-ping, and sets them against 20th century Chinese history
- The story starts with Ip Man defending southern fighting styles against a master of northern style, then follows the kung fu master to Hong Kong
Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, which was 12 years in the making, is an elegant synthesis of martial arts and Chinese history. The 2013 film sets precise depictions of martial arts styles, choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping, against the broad sweep of 20th century Chinese history, and shows the impact the century’s events had on the martial artists caught up in them.
The story revolves around legendary exponent of the wing chun style of kung fu Ip Man (played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who lived through the Chinese Republic – which Wong has described as a “golden age of Chinese kung fu” – and the anti-Japanese war before relocating to Hong Kong to found his well-known martial arts school.
“I started off wanting to look at Ip Man the person. Later on, however, I discovered that what I really wanted was to examine the whole martial arts landscape,” Wong told Clarence Tsui in a Hollywood Reporter interview. “I think that the biggest question for me was, what made Ip Man so remarkable? … His life is a microcosm of contemporary Chinese history.”
Partially out of a desire to make the film accessible to different audiences, and partially out of a wish to experiment, Wong made the film available in four different versions.
The Hong Kong/mainland Chinese version of The Grandmaster focuses more on the historical elements, while the shorter US version concentrates on the relationship between Ip Man and northern-style martial artist Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi). There is also a European version, and a 3D version created by Wong himself, which the director has said is his favourite.