Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster: Ip Man and Women of Kung Fu

Introduction

Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster begins with a stylish kung fu action sequence set in the rain. Ip Man battles a dozen or so unnamed opponents before a one-on-one showdown with a combatant who appears to be his equal in skill and strength. Ip Man handily defeats him and walks away unscathed. Thanks to fight choreography by Yuen Woo-ping — the Chinese director and martial arts choreographer behind The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — the sequence appears to set up a very different sort of movie than what follows, which is a mostly soulful, introspective look at a period in the life of Ip Man.

Wong Kar-Wai gravitates toward 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 nothing of the sort ever occurred in the historical record. 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 to 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 the artist, yet the more kung fu one knows, the more one seems perpetually caught in conflict. Gong Er also embodies the director's tendency to romanticize Ip Man's life, a feeling that is strong from the very first frame to the last.

This paper compares Wong Kar-Wai's Ip Man with the real Ip Man and discusses how the character in the film illuminates certain aspects of the historical Grandmaster while exaggerating others. It also examines the role of the female kung fu artist during this period as represented by Gong Er, and compares that portrayal with the historical reality.

The Real Ip Man vs. Wong Kar-Wai's Ip Man

Wong Kar-Wai's Ip Man in The Grandmaster is a romanticized, poeticized figure that does more to represent the director's fascination with specific themes — and how time, place, and events bear on those themes — than it does to represent the actual Ip Man in any realistic capacity. As Jon Nielson of Wing Chun Hall notes in his review of the film, the fight scenes 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 it 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 in the film's depiction of Ip Man's life, presented in a confusing manner that does not allow the viewer much clarity; the average moviegoer is likely to be put off by the film's artistic pretensions, which are grounded more in the director's attempt to produce a thoughtful meditation on a kind of yin-yang phenomenon, using Ip Man, Gong Er, and kung fu as backdrop.

While Wai's Ip Man is depicted in romantic terms — the sidelong looks, the poised figure who stands alone in the rain to defy any who dares to assault him — the actual Ip Man was a far more human character, whose life was shaped by down-to-earth circumstances rather than the heightened, dramatic scenes depicted in the film.

The real story of Ip Man is this: he was married to a woman of his own social class, which, as the film correctly points out, was high. The film also does a fair job of portraying the fall in fortune of Ip Man and his family — another example of its main theme, the destructive effect of time. However, the couple had eight children, four boys and four girls, and four of those children died. 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. When the Communists seized power in Foshan in 1949, he had to flee, doing so accompanied by his oldest daughter. In Hong Kong he turned to Wing Chun as a means of livelihood. He eventually brought his family to Hong Kong in the 1950s, but his wife did not wish to remain there and returned 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 he is attempting to cultivate on screen. Wai's version of Ip Man is one in which the titular character's stoicism and honor are put on grand display alongside his cinematic fighting skills. In reality, Wing Chun was not quite so action-film-esque, and the real story of Ip Man 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 period cannot be overstated: China was undergoing a violent and convulsive transformation as Mao attempted to remake the country, cutting its people off from the past, from Confucian teachings, and from 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 reshape China according to his own ideology. This reality is somewhat lost in Wai's depiction of Ip Man, who comes across as a kind of superhero with an amazing gift for sending opponents flying, yet who really just wants to be left alone because he dislikes hurting people. Nielson explains how the Ip Man of the film simply does not align with the historical Ip Man: "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 more in line with the director's own interest in conflicting themes of love and death, violence and peace, the dramatization falls short of the real-life drama that might just as easily have been reproduced on screen. Wai chooses to fit the characters to the philosophy 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 members were honored for their skills. As Nielson notes, this was simply not the reality. He describes Ip Man's actual situation 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 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 dimension of Ip Man's life is precisely what is missing from Wai's portrayal. Wai paints Ip Man as a determined loner whose art lifts him beyond the ordinary realm of mere mortals, playing into the Hong Kong kung fu cinematic mythology parodied so effectively by Stephen Chow in Kung Fu Hustle. Instead of attempting a true biopic, Wai places Ip Man in heroic status with karate-chop kicks reminiscent of Neo in The Matrix — which ultimately does the film a disservice, since the underlying tension is philosophical and the superficial action sequences do not support that tension 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 stylistic license he takes is intended to produce a specific effect on the audience. The only question is what kind of effect this is meant to achieve. As Nielson further notes, it is not the fact that the film depicts fight scenes that is problematic — it is that those scenes are depicted in a way that is incongruous with reality: "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 critique of Wai's unrealistic kung fu sequences is not undeserved. For a film that attempts to mine the depths of the human spirit and its place in the larger world, a more grounded sense of Ip Man's day-to-day affairs would have helped bring out the actual circumstances of life in Hong Kong and China during the period depicted. Instead, Wai crafts an artistic meditation on the conflicts he perceives not only in the martial arts themselves but also in the larger human drama.

Conclusion

Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster is a poetic depiction of a period in the life of Ip Man, a martial artist known for training some of the greatest kung fu practitioners of the modern era. The film takes considerable dramatic license with Ip Man's biography and with the style and skill of kung fu itself. At times it appears to pull in multiple directions at once — toward romance, toward philosophy, toward action, and toward drama. While the final effect may be disorienting, the director's overall aim is understandable when the film is considered on its own terms: it is less an examination of the named characters on screen and more an examination of the themes the director is compelled to explore — rendered here through the use of both historical and fictional figures.

Works Cited

Boone, Steven. "The Grandmaster." Roger Ebert, 2013. Web. 23 June 2017. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-grandmaster-2013

Fitzgerald, C. P. "Religion and China's Cultural Revolution." Pacific Affairs, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, 1967, pp. 124–129. Print.

Judkins, Ben. "Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (9): Woman Ding Number Seven: Founder of the Fujian Yongchun Boxing Tradition." Chinese Martial Arts Studies, 2013. Web. 23 June 2017.

Judkins, Ben. "Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (10): Chen Shichao and Chen Gongzhe: Creating the Jingwu Revolution." Chinese Martial Arts Studies, 2013. Web. 23 June 2017.

Judkins, Ben. "Lives of Chinese Martial Artists (11): Mok Kwai Lan — The Mistress of Hung Gar." Chinese Martial Arts Studies, 2013. Web. 23 June 2017.

Nielson, Jon. "The Grandmaster: A Dissenting View." Chinese Martial Arts Studies, 2013. Web. 23 June 2017.