"The Grandmaster" is Lost in Translation

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Friday, 30 August 2013 14:21

Written by Matt Oakes

Culture is a thing worthy of celebration, not a placeholder. It's a proud artifact of a civilization that distinguishes its unique place in the world while offering a respectful homage to the past. In large part, world cinema is dictated by Hollywood but the cross-pollination taking place here crosses a line in the sand, using cultural differences as a means to gut and sanitize a film that was once called great. This Americanized cut clearly is not.

Foreign films like Amelie aim to invite us into a distinctly different world that works not in spite of their cultural inconsistencies with our more familiar Hollywood fare but because of them. Amelie wasn't hacked down, re-spliced and formatted to fit an American audience ideal of three-act basics. It was perfect just the way it was.

Likewise, Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mamá También didn't bandage its decadent carnal acts. It wore its overtly sexualized heart on its sleeve, regardless of the puritan American mainstream who just so happened to gulp it up. We didn't need a redux where everything just so happens to work out in the end because we didn't need it. Similarly, Guillermo del Toro's bleak Pan's Labyrinth wasn't sterilized with a storybook ending. No, we couldn't wash the gritty, greasy afterbirth nightmares we get from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days out of our brains and yet it's a film that would have been laughed right out of the studio system. It works because it showed us something different, something distinctly non-American.

This brings us to The Grandmaster, a film referred to by the droves who saw it open at the Berlin International Film Festival as a "masterpiece." I can tell you frankly, what I saw was no masterpiece. The narrative shifts felt wooden, character movement is frantic and often ungrounded and an attempt to simplify two life stories into one 108-minute film reaches too far. There are moments of grandeur, some stunning camera work and often interesting focal points for the masterful kung-fu battles splayed throughout the film but these are overshadowed by a disjointed narrative and increasing sense of something missing. The only rational conclusion is that in hopping from one continent to another, something has been lost in translation.

Produced over the course of three years (filming itself dictating almost two years), director Wong Kar-wai admits that he himself took a scissor to the original 130 minute cut to make it more "Americanized." Although he stands behind the select-copy-deleting of entire portions of his film, we have to wonder what qualifies a Hong Kong native as an arbiter for what works best for an American audience. Over at The Huffington Post, Wai had a chance to speak out and express his stamp of approval on this US cut of the film:

"As a filmmaker, let me say that the luxury of creating a new cut for U.S. audiences was the opportunity to reshape it into something different than what I began with -- a chance one doesn't always get as a director and an undertaking much more meaningful than simply making something shorter or longer."

Here, Kar-wai admits how his reshaping impacts the final result in far more ways than run-time. What he fails to realize is just how much he has castrated his film by attempting to perfect it for an audience that he doesn't understand.

For a parallel from the past on how edits can entirely change the meaning of a film, take for example Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Now often called a "sci-fi masterpiece," Scott's original vision was buried under a studio-ordered voice-over ending that made the conclusion seem more suitable and close-booked than the vaguely ambiguous and much more thought-provoking original cut. Thankfully, that edit was largely redacted and Scott's far superior vision was able to shine through to his audiences via his much-celebrated Director's Cut. What Blade Runner proves is that even a fragment as short as a minute can change the entire course of a film. Accordingly, it is without question that a re-cut removing a whole 22 minutes can morph a masterpiece into just another lukewarm kung-fu film.

Another flagrant case of authorial manipulation is Anthony Burgess's fiery novel A Clockwork Orange. In the American version of the novel, the last chapter was excised entirely - cut clean from the book and swept away. For those unfamiliar with the novel, it involves a young, rapey ruffian, Alex, who is institutionalized in experimental hopes of ridding him of his ultra-violent ways (involving methods too extreme even for the US government). Much lo and behold, after all of this course-correction, Alex eventually returns to a life of debauchery and evil doing. This is where the American-version of the book and the still fantastic Stanley Kubrick film end.

With this conclusion, we're meant to take away that you can't change a bird's feathers permanently just by painting them a different color. We get it. But the original novel jumps forward a ways into the future where Alex just suddenly grows out of being such a mean-spirited douche, entirely changing the message so precisely lain into the framework of the story. It says, "Change comes only from within, never from an outside source forcing it upon you." But those conniving publishers thought this was too much flip-flopping for an American audience to comprehend and instead reshaped the message and shifted the entire cultural zeitgeist revolving around this great work of art.

Returning to The Grandmaster, even though having the approval of director Kar-wai frames the whole re-editing process in a less authoritarian light than what took place in Scott and Burgess's work, it is still a manipulation of vision for the percieved sake of an audience. An audience he obviously fails to understand. Like George Lucas returning to our beloved Star Wars trilogy (you know which one I'm referring to) and making Greedo shoot first, little changes make a big difference.

I wish that I had indeed seen the original cut of the film as I feel like I could fairly access it on different terms if that was the case, but as is, The Grandmaster feels doggedly incomplete. It's packed with some truly stunning cinematography and a bulk of inspired directorial choices but is cut down by the hand that feeds it, resulting in a strange cross-cultural-hybrid nearly as confused as it is confusing.

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