The Grandmaster/Blossoms Shanghai: the double return of Wong Kar-Wai

On the one hand, ten new minutes of The Grandmaster to find a beloved filmmaker. On the other, thirty hours of the Blossoms Shanghai series to lose it again.

Wong Kar-Wai fans all have a weakness for unfinished stories. It has to do with the films themselves, of course, all filled with intrigues left unresolved, with romances fantasized but never brought to fruition, with the beginnings of stories which break up and get lost in plumes of smoke… But it also has to do with the way in which the sphinx-filmmaker with dark glasses makes them, these films, through lengthy shoots and months of hesitation in the editing room, a process which gives the impression that the work which The result is only a fragment of another, much larger film, lost along the way and forever invisible.

Unfinished, WKW’s filmography also seemed to be unfinished since 2013 and the release of The Grandmaster, a true-false biopic of the martial arts master, Ip Man, received at the time as a sort of incomplete masterpiece. In the ten years that followed, Wong didn’t tour anymore, didn’t give much news… He hadn’t retired (the excuse his colleagues generally use when they’re in a creative impasse) but time was passing. Should we view The Grandmaster, in all its “disappointing” beauty, as a swan song? And the last shot of the film, where Ip Man poses serenely for a photographer (and eternity), as the end point of WKW’s work? We couldn’t completely come to terms with it.

Magnum opus

This feeling of a final point is actually given to us by the long Chinese version of The Grandmaster (released at the time there, but unpublished here). The film only lasts ten additional minutes, but this extra time is enough to transfigure it, make it even more romantic (it literally comes down to a lock of Zhang Ziyi’s hair), give it absolute fluidity and harmony. Perhaps it is in fact him, WKW’s magnum opus, his grand masterpiece, his Once Upon a Time in America. His filmography would end there until it was completed. But as with Wong, nothing is ever finished, we will have to discuss the place of The Grandmaster in his work while trying to climb Blossoms Shanghai mountain in parallel…

Broadcast in China at the end of 2023, this series in 30 (!) episodes tells the story of the Chinese economic boom of the 90s through the rise of a handsome businessman, coached by an old sifu, a sort of grandmaster of finance. We expected the series to be a maze-like work, a delirium-maze a la Twin Peaks: The Return, but in reality we are facing formatted, very commercial TV, almost a Shanghainese Dallas with a gallery of XXL characters, rivalries, dirty tricks, a mess of subplots…

The codes of WKW cinema are there (slow motion, reflections, actors too good to be true), but in an almost advertising form. Completionists will hang in there, especially since we read on a forum that “it gets really good from the 15th episode”. At the end of the first eight – those provided by Mubi to the press – we are not sure that we will ever reach the end of this saga. Ah, the delicious scent of unfinished stories…

The Grandmaster extended version, in theaters February 25

Blossoms Shanghai, from February 26 on MUBI