The Master

师父

China, 2015, colour, 2.35:1, 109 mins.

Director: Xu Haofeng 徐浩峰.

Rating: 8/10.

Martial-arts auteur Xu Haofeng finally comes up with a movie worthy of his offbeat ambitions.

STORY

Tianjin, northern China, 1932. Twenty-one years after the city opened the first wuguan 武馆 (martial arts school) in Republican China, Tianjin is a hot centre for fighters wanting to prove themselves. Chen Shi (Liao Fan), a practitioner of yongchun quan 咏春拳 with double knives, arrives from Guangdong province to open his own wuguan. He successfully shows off his skills to Zheng Shan’ao (Jin Shijie), a 30-year-long martial-arts veteran who’s never heard of the southern style. To open a new wuguan in Tianjin there is an unwritten rule that the applicant has to beat eight of the city’s 19 wuguan in competitions. The largest number anyone has reached so far is five. Zheng Shan’ao supports Chen Shi’s plan and explains that he should nominate a student to take his place in the competitions. However, that student’s training will take three years. Realising he will be spending some time in Tianjin, Chen Shi proposes a three-year deal to a waitress, Zhao Guohui (Song Jia), to live with him as his wife but with no ties for the future. Because of her poor background – and having had a child by a foreigner when she was 17 – she has no local prospects, so she finally agrees. The couple live simply on the edge of town, eating crabs. A coolie labourer, Geng Liangchen (Song Yang), visits them and is taken on as a pupil by Chen Shi. Then Zheng Shan’ao tells Chen Shi that he is to represent the eight wuguan against Chen Shi’s pupil, if the latter is successful. He asks Chen Shi to school him in yongchun quan; it will be the final fight of his career. A year later, Geng Liangchen has started to take on the city’s other wuguan, winning every time. He also has a spikey friendship with a tea girl (Maidina) who works opposite his streetside book stall in the city. Meanwhile, Zhao Guohui tells Chen Shi she’s not sure if she can marry and follow him back to Guangdong once his school opens, as Tianjin women don’t marry outsiders. Geng Liangchen now challenges the eighth wuguan, an all-women martial-arts school run by Zou (Jiang Wenli), who is worried that he may succeed. Zheng Shan’ao advises her to stay calm, but he himself is then humiliated by an ambitious KMT officer, Lin Xiwen (Huang Jue), who wins a private contest with Zheng Shan’ao and has it recorded on film. Zheng Shan’ao considers retirement. And then Chen Shi learns who is really in charge of Tianjin’s wuguan.

REVIEW

After two clumsy attempts to bring his own short stories to the screen, it’s third time lucky for Xu Haofeng 徐浩峰, a writer in his early 40s who’s not only the first Chinese wuxia author to become a film director but also a Daoist scholar, martial-arts practitioner, Beijing Film Academy graduate, drama director and movie critic. After the academic, obscure and lumpily directed The Sword Identity 倭寇的踪迹 (2011) and Judge Archer 箭士柳白猿 (2012), it was beginning to look as if Xu was just an all-round clever clogs who assumed film-making could be another notch on his belt. For whatever reason, however, all that was wrong about Sword and Archer is now right with The Master 师父: the screenplay, from Xu’s 2012 short story of the same name, not only preserves his ironic, post-modern view of the wuxia world and its heroes and codes but also manages this time (a) to be comprehensibly plotted, (b) to translate into a real movie with dramatic and emotional arcs, and (c) to create characters the viewer can engage with. The Master is still specialist entertainment rather than a mainstream martial arts movie; but it succeeds on its own terms and is almost entirely free of the previous films’ intellectual arrogance.

Whatever is to account for the sudden transformation of Xu into a real film-maker, it isn’t because of any dramatic change in the technical personnel. As on Sword and Archer, Xu himself is director, writer, editor and action choreographer, and as on Archer the d.p. is again Wang Tianlin 王天麟 (Song of the Phoenix 百鸟朝凤, 2013) and the music again handled by experienced composer/sound technician An Wei 安巍 (Go Lala Go! 杜拉拉升职记, 2010). Between them they create a smooth product that has a cinematic rather than academic look, with richly textured and more mobile camerawork by Wang and with the quirky, angular score (violin, trumpet, guitar) by An adding splashes of atmosphere. The editing, credited this time to He Sisi 何思思 as well as to Xu, has a dramatic ebb and flow that’s constructed from greater coverage rather than using one or two master shots.

The sudden transformation is partly due to the cast. Xu again uses regulars like Song Yang 宋洋 (the personable lead in both Sword and Archer, here playing a cocky student) and Ma Jun 马君 (here a head coolie) but the lion’s share of the drama is carried by more seasoned names this time round. The slightly hippy-ish Liao Fan 廖凡 (the detective in Black Coal, Thin Ice 白日焰火, 2014; the scruffy charmer in Only You 命中注定, 2015) is offbeat casting for the titular wushu master, but he creates a magnetic, focused personality from the start. Along with seasoned actress Jiang Wenli 蒋雯丽 (And the Spring Comes 立春, 2008) as the manly head of an all-female wuguan, and veteran Taiwan actor Jin Shijie 金士杰 as an almost-retired grandee, there’s a lot of powerful talent on screen at any one time – not to mention younger cast like Song Jia 宋佳 [aka Xiao Song Jia 小宋佳], 35, who as in Falling Flowers 萧红 (2012) brings a reserved dignity to her role as the master’s companion that contrasts nicely with Liao’s physicality. Further flavouring the pie are name cameos like Shaw Brothers veteran Chen Guantai 陈观泰 and Taiwan’s Dai Liren 戴立忍 [Leon Dai], as well as a host of real-life martial artists and Xu’s pals.

The Master, therefore, can’t help but have more dramatic heft. As the inexpressive southern master trying to set up shop in a northern martial-arts stronghold, Liao has an intensity that’s also marbled with irony – seen at its best in a terrific sequence, 30 minutes in, when he holds off 20 fighters with a long pole while having an intimate heart-to-heart with his companion (expertly played here by Song with a dreamy grace). Jin, so good as the evil eunuch in Brotherhood of Blades 绣春刀 (2014), visibly relishes his role of a veteran, goateed master, mixing comedy and pathos in his scenes with Liao, whether in a swanky western restaurant or facing off in a Chinese wuguan. Always an actress with a strong physical presence, Jiang, who dominates the second half, also has a lot of fun with her role – a powerful wuguan mistress in male clothing. All of them handle Xu’s pithy, mock-heroic dialogue with great style, never allowing things to tip over into parody.

Xu’s trademark of action erupting and passing in the blink of an eye is again on show, but the martial arts is not generally staged in such a dramatic way as in the more stylised Sword and Archer. The cast performs convincingly enough but the fights are actually more conventional; the reason they have a greater power this time is because the viewer is emotionally invested in those taking part. The highlight is a series of battles between Liao’s character and various fighters as he progresses along a narrow hutong. The sequence harks back to scores of similar ones in studio-bound martial-arts movies of the 1960s and 1970s, and Xu has staged this kind of scene before, notably in Sword. But here it actually works in dramatic terms, with Xu finally showing an understanding of how editing and multiple camera set-ups can help to structure setpieces. (The sequence reportedly took 11 days to shoot.)

Where Sword was set in the late Ming dynasty and Archer in 1917, The Master takes place in 1932, with Xu’s martial artists and their codes shown to be even more of an anachronism as the 20th century progresses, western influences make themselves even more felt, and the military becomes the dominant force in Republican China rather than local power groups like wuguan. The film’s design by Xian Ruiqing 贤瑞清 (An Inaccurate Memoir 匹夫, 2012) delights in period details – a 1930s bowling alley, film-making equipment, a movie show in a teahouse (featuring the 1928 silent Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery 火烧红莲寺), a western pastry shop, a western restaurant with Belorussian dancing girls – without letting them get in the way of the characters. Though Xu clearly has a sympathy for his protagonists, he also portrays them as ruthlessly self-centred people who deserve whatever fate they get.

The southern martial-arts style practised by the hero – yongchun quan 咏春拳 – is better known internationally by its Cantonese name Wing Chun, most famously used by Ye Wen 叶问 [Ip Man]. The original short stories for all three of Xu’s features are collected, with others, in 徐浩峰武侠短篇合集 (“The Collected Wuxia Short Stories of Xu Haofeng”). The film took three months to shoot during summer 2014 – in Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing and Shanghai – but though it was easily Xu’s biggest box-office success to date, it still only earned a very modest RMB55 million. The film is also known under the English title The Final Master.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Century Partner Culture & Media (CN). Produced by Beijing Century Partner Culture & Media (CN).

Script: Xu Haofeng. Novella: Xu Haofeng. Photography: Wang Tianlin. Editing: Xu Haofeng, He Sisi. Music: An Wei. Art direction: Xian Ruiqing. Costumes: Chen Tongxun. Sound: Long Xiaozhu, Zhang Jinyan, Yu Qiang. Action: Xu Haofeng. Action consultation: Zhang Mengsheng. Visual effects: Zhu Xiaobin, Wang Jing, Yin Yong (Revo-FX).

Cast: Liao Fan (Chen Shi), Song Jia (Zhao Guohui), Jiang Wenli (Zou, wuguan head), Jin Shijie (Zheng Shan’ao), Huang Jue (Lin Xiwen, KMT officer), Song Yang (Geng Liangchen), Maidina [Madina Memet] (tea girl), Dai Liren [Leon Dai] (curved knives fighter), Chen Guantai (rickshaw puller/broadsword wuguan head), Xiong Xinxin (Tang), Zhang Aoyue (Duan Rui), Ma Jun (head coolie), Qiu Jirong (Yinghua Wuguan fist-challenge master), Li Bo (Yongnian Wuguan fist-challenge master), Zou Jiahao (Guozi), Karina (Belorussian dancer), Zhao Guixiang, Li Chunsui (broadsword fighters), Zhang Mengsheng (pudao broadsword fighter), Peng Zhi (yuefei halberd fighter), Cui Xiaopeng (halberd fighter), Liu Hongjin, Wang Baoshan (tomahawk fighters), Liu Ziwei (dagger fighter), Chen Wei (eight-cuts dagger fighter), Zhao Zheng (halberd fighter), Li Guisheng (referee), Bo Bing (Yinghua Wuguan manager), Xie Yong (Yinghua Wuguan head), Shang Yansheng (ruffian in unruly area/Robbie), Yang Xiaobo (Shenzhou Wuguan fighter), Liu Miao, Ai Lin (Shenzhou Wuguan students), Liu Xinyi (Chen Shi’s wuguan manager), Anton Shapovaiov (bakery waiter), Li Yiming (pianist), Li Guangfu (Shenzhou Wuguan manager), Yan Changhai (monk in film Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery).

Premiere: Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan, 11 Nov 2015.

Release: China, 10 Dec 2015.