Jumbled plot serves up visual extravaganza

It is said every Chinese filmmaker has a kung-fu dream. Zhang Yimou minted Hero and House of Flying Daggers; Chen Kaige made Promise; Feng Xiaogang offered his Banquet. And now comes the turn for Wong Kar-wai, favorite of the European film festival circuit, whose art-house sensibility infuses every frame of his latest grand and grandiose epic.

The Grandmaster is two hours of sumptuously photographed scenes in search of narrative coherence. Take any five-minute sequence from the movie, and it is an indisputable masterpiece. But strangely, the parts are larger than the whole. The plot structure has such big holes in it that the complete martial arts academy can march through. Wong might have shot so much material he could assemble another fragmented movie out of it.

The title character is Ip Man, who popularized Wing Chun-style boxing in Hong Kong. His tenuous claim to fame partly rests with one picture he took with his youthful student Bruce Lee. That detail is lovingly recreated in Wong's movie, bringing a smile to every audience member familiar with the folklore of Hong Kong cinema or martial arts. That child actor has a jaw eerily similar to that of the kung-fu superstar.

The Grandmaster is almost a biopic of Ip Man, chronicling his wild days in his hometown Foshan. The town is now a suburb of Guangzhou, where Ip Man spends much of his time in an over-crowded and over-decorated brothel, up to his last days in Hong Kong.

Like the half-dozen Ip Man movies before this one, Wong's version touches on his suffering during the Japanese occupation, but there is no resistance fist-style or otherwise. Ip Man as portrayed by Tony Leung is polite, reserved and resilient. He does not go around picking fights, but he is not afraid to strut his stuff when challenged.

We also learn that the master is reticent around his home. He rarely shows any emotion to his wife. When Zhang Ziyi's character, a martial-arts opponent who once challenged him and won, reveals her affection for him during their last meeting, he does not respond in any way either.

The biggest surprise is not his lack of verbal expression, but his lack of involvement in the main dramatic arc. Ip Man has two elaborate fight sequences, one with traitorous Ma San and the other with Gong Er, Zhang's character. There are a few smaller ones, but they are all exhibition games, so to speak, friendly contests that are the action equivalent of Woody Allen-style chatter.