Ip Man

It was a dark time for Hong Kong martial arts films. Thai actioners were saturating the market and domestic stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li had long been written off as relics of a time when using wires for kung fu was inconceivable. The year was 2008 and director Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen, the charisma-deficient Old Stone Face of Wing Chun fighting, had collaborated on Ip Man, the first of what is so far a three-film series about jingoism, self-reliance and ritualized violence. The film won a dozen awards, including the Golden Horse Award (the Chinese equivalent of the Oscars) for best action choreography. While Ip Man carries on in the tradition of contextless historical fight films—like the wildly popular Once Upon a Time in China movies—it remains an inexplicable, contextless bit of kung fu historicosploitation—albeit a very satisfying one. Because of popular demand, it now screens in New York uncut, undubbed and in its full Hong Kong version at Cinema Village.

Yen stars as Brother Man, a wealthy, happily married man who leads a simple, though hardly demure, life. He has an idyllic nuclear family supporting him and is secure in the knowledge that he is the best martial artist in all of Fuoshan, a city known for its dojos. He’s unperturbed by the changing times and, as a friend accuses, is only concerned with eating, sleeping and training.

Man is the role Yen was made to play: a stoic tough guy that everybody in the community knows is the best and hence everybody turns to for protection, like a Chinese mafioso. By contrast, the only local cop in Ip Man is a trigger-happy hysteric that Man handily disarms, putting the power of policing the neighborhood back into the hands of the most qualified local in the neighborhood: him. Might doesn’t always make right in kung fu films but in this case, there’s no doubt that it does.

Ip Man is bifurcated into two time periods: pre-WWII, when Man was free to strut his stuff as Fuoshan’s defender, and wartime, when all the formerly independent kung fu masters are forced to dig coal and fight against bloodthirsty Japanese martial artists for an eighth full bag of rice. A local bandit like Jin Shan Zhao (Siu-Wong Fan) is stopped from thriving in the first era but it takes the war era, when fighters are shot when they best their oppressors, for Man to realize that his neighbors’ cries to be trained by him can no longer be ignored.

The self-fashioned tradition of built-in chauvinism in Ip Man is extraordinary. It’s a knowingly more conservative period drama than even the early Shaw brothers films from the 1960s that inspired Chan, then Li and finally Yen’s generation. Man’s wife, for example, seems only to exist to demurely support Man: She bawls before the film’s finale that she never supported his kung fu habit enough.

That final conflict between evil General Sanpo and Man—who of course still has to fight the biggest bad guy since the locals are too incompetent to even fight a group of disorganized bandits—is also curiously ruthless. Sanpo is likened to Man’s coat rack-like training apparatus, making the flurry of blows Man rains down on Sanpo’s head a vicious attack on a dehumanized piece of furniture. It’s a fittingly abstract and totally brutal finale to the biggest thing in Hong Kong martial arts today.

Ip Man, directed by Wilson Yip, at Cinema Village, Runtime: 107 min.