Most of Wong Kar Wai's movies spend their time illustrating the smokey, shadowy nuance of how we encounter one another, but The Grandmaster doesn't spend enough time there. I immediately re-watched Days of Being Wild when I got home from watching The Grandmaster. The main character, a sociopathic playboy insists a girl (behind a counter, of course) stand with him for one minute and then proclaims them "one minute friends," a status that is fact and can never be taken back. Wong Kar Wai has a gift for capturing the sensation of the present moment's inherent transience. In Chungking Express (1994) the voiceover says, "At our closest point, we were just 0.01cm apart from each other." At his best, Wong Kar Wai is concerned with examining these smallest of spaces between us. That 0.01 cm is evoked during In The Mood For Love (2000) when Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung pass each other on the staircase in a moment so restrained and sexy it's nearly too much to handle. The aforementioned flip in The Grandmaster is also about that 0.01 centimeters. The immersion in those moments is why Wong Kar Wai's movies are breathtaking.

Wong Kar Wai's first and only English-language film, My Blueberry Nights (2007), was a flop. I hated it along with everyone else I ever spoke to or whose review I read. It was Wong Kar Wai trying to be Wong Kar Wai and it was sad and weird to watch. The Grandmaster is not like that. It's a smart, careful, beautiful movie in a lot of ways. Some of the fights are spectacular, Ip Man is a fascinating person and I could watch Tony Leung brood for 108 minutes or 130 minutes or however long he felt like it. But one gets the impression that Wong Kar Wai is struggling; rehashing his old tricks isn't quite enough, but neither is leaving them behind. How can his themes, images and concerns evolve with him? Christopher Doyle had some mean things to say about how long it took to make 2046 and called it an "unnecessary" movie. So, what would a necessary Wong Kar Wai movie look like? While I wouldn't nominate The Grandmaster as my answer to that question, I'm still glad it exists and am grateful to have seen it in a theatre where all the gold light, speeding trains and slow motion rain drops were lushly delivered on the big screen.

tumblr_mr3whsVNQ31r0k2r8o1_500 — Leslie Cheung and Maggie Cheung in *Days of Being Wild.*

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The Necessity of Wong Kar Wai