Ip Man The Grandmaster and Women in Kung Fu

Wong Kar Wai's Grandmaster begins with a stylish kung fu action sequence set in the rain. Ip Man battles a dozen or so no-names before doing a one-on-one show with another combatant who appears to be at equal skill and strength. Ip Man handily defeats him and walks away unscathed. Thanks to fight choreography by Chinese director and martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (The Matrix, Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), the sequence would seem to set up a different sort of movie than what follows, which is a mostly soulful, introspective look at period in the life of Ip Man. Wong Kar Wai gravitates towards dramatic license in many places -- especially with the fictional character of Gong Er, who repeatedly enters and re-enters Ip Man's life in the film (even though no such thing ever actually happened in the historical account of the Grandmaster). Wai's purpose is not so much to provide a historical biography of the man as it is to tap into the greater themes that made him who he was and bring that poetic essence out in ways that resemble personification. Thus, Gong Er represents both the gracefulness of Kung Fu -- its delicate and precise nature -- and the way it contradictorily situates one in life (peace may be the desire of artist, but the more kung fu you know the more it seems you are perpetually fighting). Gong Er also represents the director's tendency to romanticize the life of Ip Man -- a feeling that is strong from the very first frame to the last. This paper will compare Wong Kar Wai's Ip Man with the real Ip Man and discuss how the character in the film brings out certain aspects of the real life Grandmaster while exaggerating others; it will also examine the role of the female kung fu artist during this time as represented by Gong Er and compare the latter's portrayal with the reality.

Wong Kar Wai's Ip Man in Grandmaster is a romanticized, poeticized figure that does more to represent the director's fascination with specific themes and how time, place, and events come to bear on those themes than it does to represent the actual Ip Man in any realistic capacity. As Jon Nielson of Wing Chun Hall in Salt Lake City notes in his review of the film, the fight scenes of the film are neither authentically reproduced nor believable in their context. Likewise, the story of Ip Man is confused in its particulars and many liberties are taken by the director. The problem with the film overall is that it is unclear for whom the film is intended: the serious martial artist will be turned off by the campy fight scenes in which a leg kick sends an opponent hurling backwards in one of kung fu cinema's most gratuitous and exaggerated depictions of real kung fu; the historian will be turned off by the inaccuracies of the film's depiction of Ip Man's life, which are more or less put on screen in a confusing manner that does not allow the viewer much clarity; the average moviegoer is likely to be turned off by the fact that this is not an average film but has some artistic pretensions that are grounded more in the director's attempt to produce a thoughtful piece on some type of yin-yang phenomenon, using Ip Man, Gong Er and kung fu as the backdrop.

While Wai's Ip Man is depicted in romantic terms -- the sidelong looks, the poised character who stands alone in the rain to defy any who dares to assault him -- the actual Ip Man was a much more human character, whose life was touched by actual and real human situations that were more down to earth than the heightened and dramatic scenes depicted in the film.

The real story of Ip Man is this: Ip Man was married to woman of his own social class, which as the film points out, was high (and the film does a fair job of portraying the fall in fortune of Ip Man and his family -- another example of the main theme of the film, which is the destructive effect of time in the end). However, they had eight children, four boys and four girls. Four of the children died, and according to Nielson, "the family did lose their fortune due to economic downturns, some of which were the results of the Sino-Japanese war, but mostly due to the 1911 revolution and finally to the communist takeover" (par. 3). Ip Man served as a detective in the Republic of China and took part in anti-communist work as part of his job, and when the Communists seized power in Foshan in 1949, Ip Man had to leave, which he did with his oldest daughter accompanying him. In Hong Kong he turned to Wing Chun as a way to make a livelihood. He eventually brought his family to Hong Kong in the 1950s but his wife did not wish to remain there and she left Ip Man to return to Foshan, taking the children with her. At that point, Nielson states, "Ip Man took a mistress. He had one son with her" (par. 3). Wai leaves this out of the film entirely as it does not mesh with the vision that he is attempting to cultivate on the screen. Wai's version of Ip Man is one in which the titular character's stoicism and honor are put on display in grand fashion alongside his cinematic fighting skills. In reality, Wing Chun was not quite so action-film-esque and the real story of Ip Man is one that is far more down to earth. Ip Man's wife died of cancer in Foshan in the 1950s. His two surviving sons "were sent to reeducation camps by the communists, and in 1963, they fled communist China to be with their father" (Nielson par. 3).

Indeed, the realities of what was happening in China during this time cannot be understated: China was undergoing a violent and convulsive fit as Mao attempted transform the country into something new, cutting its people off from the past, from its Confucian teachings and its traditional culture. C. P. Fitzgerald stated that it was the "purpose of the Cultural Revolution as a whole to eliminate the principal features of the old society, and in particular all that [had] the taint of foreign origin" (124). Mao was determined to change China to make it fit the ideology that he himself espoused. This reality is somewhat lost in Wai's depiction of Ip Man, who is depicted as a man who, like a superhero, has this amazing gift to send all opponents flying, yet really just wants to be left alone because he does not like hurting people. Nielson explains how the Ip Man of the film simply does not jive with the Ip Man of real life: "Wong Kar Wai's Ip Man says something to the effect of, 'What we do with our hands and feet is under our control, but what happens outside of that is just fate.' Why would a martial artist say that? I realize that this quote is from a villain, but in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon, Master Han says, 'We are men who create ourselves.' That's the spirit of the martial arts, not blind submission to fate" (par. 4). In other words, while Wai attempts to create a character that is more in line with the director's own interest in conflicting themes of love and death, violence and peace, the dramatization of Ip Man's life on film falls short of the real life drama that might just have easily have been reproduced on screen. Wai chooses to fit the characters to the philosophy that he wants to explore instead of exploring the philosophy of the characters as it actually existed.

This brings us to one of the most glaring problems with the film: its romanticizing of the martial arts community in Hong Kong at this time. The film makes it seem as though the martial arts community was like a secret society -- meeting in a brothel where they were all honored for their skills. As Nielson notes, this was just not the reality of the situation. He describes Ip Man's real reality in this way:

Ip Man was part of an inter-school martial arts association. Here's how it happened: when he moved to Hong Kong, several martial arts schools were causing trouble, and the police were cracking down on them. Ip Man went to the police and worked with them, registering his students so that they wouldn't cause trouble. Then he went to different schools and convinced them to join him in this effort. Eventually, they had a coalition of schools that were united in an effort to promote the reputation of the martial arts. It was practical, not some clandestine meeting for an unsanctioned fight contest (Nielson par. 5).

This practical aspect of Ip Man's life is really what is missing from Wai's portrayal. Wai paints Ip Man as a kind of determined loner whose art lifts him beyond the ordinary realm of mere mortals. Wai plays into the Hong Kong kung fu cinematic mythology, parodied to such great lengths by Stephen Chow in Kung Fu Hustle. Instead of attempting a true biopic, Wai puts Ip Man into heroic status with karate chop kicks like Neo in The Matrix -- which does the film, ultimately, a disservice, since the underlying tension of the film is really philosophical and the superficial action sequences do not lend themselves to supporting the underlying tension of the film in any substantial or realistic way. A more realistic depiction of the times would have been more appropriate -- however, Wai's vision is poetic, so the poetic and stylish license that he takes is done so in order to produce an effect on the audience. The only question is what kind of effect this is supposed to achieve. Are the fight scenes meant to show a kind of balladic artistry similar to John Woo's gun fu? Fights were not uncommon in Hong Kong, as -- just with gangs in the West -- there are always people looking to prove themselves to others by beating some foe. As Nielson goes on to note, it is not the fact that the film depicts fight scenes, it just depicts them in a way that is incongruous with the reality of the situation in Hong Kong in the 20th century: "There were fights, though. Leung Sheung and Wong Shun Leung, two of Ip Man's early students, fought with several champions from the various schools in Hong Kong and won, thus spreading the reputation of Wing Chun. These were bloody and brutal events, not some noble contest where no one gets hurt and nothing gets broken" (Nielson par. 6). Nielson's pot shot at Wei's unrealistic kung fu sequences is not undeserved -- after all, for a film that attempts to mine the depths of the human spirit and its place in the larger world of things, where time has the last laugh, a more realistic sense of the day to day affairs of Ip Man would have helped to bring out the actual circumstances of life in Hong Kong and China during the period depicted in the movie. Instead, Wai chooses to craft an artistic meditation on the conflicts that he perceives not only in the martial arts themselves but also in the larger human drama.

Gong Er is essentially a symbolic character in the film: she represents the Elusive Peace that is the undercurrent of Ip Man's use of kung fu. Like Ip Man, she seeks to have her place -- but being a woman kung fu artist, her place is virtually guaranteed to go unrecognized. The same is basically true for Ip Man: he seeks his own place in society, but because of his talent he is at once marginalized (there are so many variations of Kung Fu that it is hard to rise to fame or be seen as one whose own style is worth imitating) and contested (everyone is seeking to prove something and therefore he must constantly defend himself). Kung fu is at once a curse and blessing and Gong Er is a manifestation of this conflict at the heart of the film's philosophy. She admits to having romantic feelings for Ip Man from the first moment she saw him -- which is a signal to the audience, suggesting that if only they had met under different circumstances instead of under the umbrella of fighting; then again, were they both not devoted to martial arts, they would never have any reason to meet in the first place. The point that Wai makes is that fighting is a skill and a talent that is meant to preserve and protect, but it is also something that ironically drives a wedge between people and creates distance. Gong Er never marries are starts a family and in the end she even gives up kung fu because of a bad beating she receives that prevents her from practicing the art. It is really only at this point, too, that she is able to confess any type of love or feeling for Ip Man -- which is another indication of the director's that love can only really bloom or have a chance to blossom when the fighting is over.

To be sure, Wai does not condemn the martial arts in the film but rather points out the poetic and perhaps even tragic irony that is inherent in the form: it is beautiful, graceful, disciplined and awe-inspiring -- and yet kung fu is also something that makes people separate from others, that isolates them and puts them on pedestals that they may not really desire to be perched upon but that they yet take out of a sense of duty and obligation. It is for this reason, after all, that Ip Man accepts the initial insistence of the martial artists of the South to face the northern Grandmaster in what turns out to be a, funnily enough, a philosophical battle instead of a physical contest. Of course, that surprise is another one of Wai's main points -- kung fu is not just a physical skill, it is also a mental skill and there is much more to the kung fu master than the ability to kick and block: his mind must also be sharp, disciplined and based on honorable principles. What the northern Grandmaster recognizes in Ip Man is that type of dignity and honor that sets men apart from the common herd, and in this way Wai also uses Ip Man and Gong Er as philosophical instruments to convey a poetic respect to the martial arts and the philosophical foundations that support them.

As Steven Boone notes, "all of writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's ten feature films star one seductive, maddening, tragically romantic lead actor: time. Every one of Wong's main characters weathers an intense relationship with time." Indeed, time is really the centerpiece of Wai's Grandmaster. The film acts as a eulogy of life, hit by time, which takes away all things in the end -- even love, honor and romance. The slowing down of the rain drops in the opening fight sequence -- the near black-and-white colors that are used to make the scene pop -- the way in which the robes twirl and water dances through the air -- all of it brings to mind the nature of time and how it ultimately has the final word -- a point that Wai does not fail to make as he closes his poetic biopic out with the death of Ip Man.

Still, one of the main problems with Gong Er is her desire to save her father's art while simultaneously vowing never to marry, have children or teach her father's art to anyone. What is she saving it for then? Her own vainglory? Nielson makes the same argument and suggests it is one of the sillier aspects of the film, even if it does play into the dramatic themes that Wai wishes to explore -- the conflict between Time and Self, self-preservation and self-renunciation, society and the individual. For Nielson, a master of Wing Chun, such philosophical queries are unfit for a movie about Ip Man, whose devotion to kung fu was more about discipline and control than about soft philosophical speculation. Thus Gong Er is a problematic character in her own right. Even the intimation that she is unable to be a real kung fu master because of her sex does not mesh with reality. As Ben Judkins shows, there were actually many female kung fu masters in China during this period.