Watch THE GRANDMASTER (Yi dai zong shi) 2013 full movie Online HD streaming

Mr Yip defeats the grandmaster and later; in an attempt to recover her father’s reputation, Gong Er challenges him to another contest. She wins — yet what begins as a duel prompted by pride and defiance alludes to the ambush of complex emotions simmering beneath. There is no withholding on mind meld and sexual tension as both spar by trading blows — fleeting moments are magnified and frozen in time. But this is bad timing for affairs of the heart and they part, content with epistolary friendship as the seasons pass.

In the late 1930s during winter, Mr Yip’s promise to visit Gong Er with his family is thwarted by Japanese invasion. As the thick of this film unfolds for both protagonists, we are led down separate narrative paths. Gong Er pursues vengeance against the man who kills her father; while Mr Yip departs for Hong Kong, hoping to earn his keep teaching martial arts.

We witness the years that chronicle their transformation; this journey ends with the passing of Gong Er and eventually, Mr Yip in 1972.

The Grandmaster is classic Wong Kar Wai with a twist: the pace is gentle, unhurried and the smallest details are being eroticized. While the fates of Gong Er and Yip Man culminate beautifully in portraits of solitary longing and regrets surrounding a bygone past; the same cannot be said of supporting character, The Razor (played by Chang Chen). A minor arc built upon this grandmaster of Wudang School’s martial arts (Fist of Ba Gua) works against the fluidity of this film as a complete, transcended whole.

Martial arts films about “Ip Man” are almost always full of glory and heroic victories, The Grandmaster deviates from such simplicity. In one of the richest scenes found in this film; a rearrangement of Ennio Morricone’s Deborah’s Theme (originally used in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America) conveys a major source of meaning. This stirring kaleidoscope of strife and romance creates characters shrouded in complexity, perhaps even flawed in some ways—restrained by the whims of historical change, alone against the shifting sands of hardship.

It has been said in biography, “The Man Only I Knew” that Bruce Lee spoke of him this way:

My instructor, Professor Yip Man, head of the wing chun school, would come up to me and say: ‘Let your mind, the basic reality, do the counter-movement without any interfering deliberation. Above all, learn the art of detachment.’

If this were true; then Wong Kar Wai’s treatment of the protagonists’ lives brings a quality of secluded reticence. In the process he heightens their legacy with a hint of noble beauty.