The Grandmaster will be screened on Tuesday 26 November as part Electric Shadows: Leicester Chinese Film Festival 2024.
★★★★★ 5/5
The Grandmaster gathers so many attention-grabbing elements, including famous subject, director, actors, and so on. For international audience, the most basic knowledge of Ip Man is that he was the master of Bruce Lee, who is an important symbol for Chinese communities worldwide.
The Grandmaster revolves several martial arts duels. In 1936, northern grandmaster Gong Yutian travelled south to challenge, in order to unify the martial arts world of China, also the country itself. Although his intention was to elect a representative of the southern martial arts and spread the southern ones to the north, the south saw this as a provocation. At the same time, the north was subject to gradual annexation by Japan with no room for Chinese martial arts.
One reason of the unfinished unity is that the action for unity may bring greater division. Gong Yutian knew this and was happy to lose the fight so that Yip Man, his opponent, could represent the South. Unfortunately, Gong Yutian’s efforts were not understood at the time. During the fight, Ip Man objected to Yutian’s view that ‘the country cannot be divided into North and South’, and after the fight, Yutian’s daughter, Gong Er, challenged Ip Man for the glory of the family then won.
After the Japanese occupation in 1938, Ip Man’s life fell from spring to winter. From a life of wealth to starvation, Ip Man came to understand the need for unity of the nation, both in terms of a nation-state and national martial arts. And in the north, Gong Yutian was killed trying to fight off his disciple who had betrayed the nation. Gong Er, on the other hand, was wounded for this and renounced the Gongs’ martial arts heritage.
When Ip Man and Gong Er reunited in Hong Kong in 1951, the unity for martial arts was still unfinished. Gongs’ and many other martial artists lost their heritage. The same went for the country, which became two ways on both sides of the border in mainland China. When the unity was destined to be unfinished, Ip Man achieved the supreme state of ‘seeing all beings’ and began to teach martial arts to the public. As Wong Kar-wai said, The Grandmaster shows the beauty of what the Chinese once were. For the Chinese people, the supreme state of ‘seeing all living beings’ is is the efforts of unfinished work, also the hope that be left to descendants.
It’s nigh on impossible for audiences to pick up on the film’s complex thoughts in a single viewing, but perhaps Wong didn’t try to do that either. From the audiences’ point of view, I considered lowering the rating as a result, but in today’s post-modern world, the accurate expression of meaning is not an obligation. That’s why I chose to maintain my high praise for this film in this review.
Electric Shadows 2024 Presents: The Grandmaster
Date: Tue 26 November
Time: 19:00
Venue: Showcase Cinema, Leicester
