In Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Go Master, Chang Chen stars as the famed Go player Wu Qingyua, and the actor is as striking as ever, particularly in the passages where he’s decked out in a pair of oversize Harold Lloyd spectacles. Tian has an eye for contemplative compositions that stir the spirit, especially during the initial Go matches (something of a Japanese version of chess that can go on, quite literally, for days) where even the movement of a game piece on a board gives off a resonant psychological charge.
Tian films a number of scenes in single-take master shots with little exchange of dialogue. This heightens our impressions of Wu as an inward personality: He’s not unlike a Chinese Candide let loose in a tumultuous Japanese foster country, relying solely on his instincts and innate Go talents for survival. When one of Wu’s acquaintances dies off screen, he silently senses it (the Buddhist parable of the tree falling in the woods applied) and Tian trusts that the viewer gets the meaning from the lateral montage: that it does make a sound.
The Go Master moves continually forward along such straight, even-keeled lines and this is ultimately its undoing. Eras collapse one into another (the most striking transition depicts the Hiroshima bomb blast as a punctuating explosion of off-white light and splintered tatami) and Wu, slave to biopic rhythms, randomly appears as the need arises and the setting desires—here a member of the “Jiu Kyou” sect, there a quiet old man gazing out over an “enlightened” ocean.
There’s little sense in The Go Master of a journey reaching culmination, experience left visibly in its wake. Wu is finally Tian’s hollowed-out puppet, in service of an allegory about Chinese-Japanese relations that’s more an example of Fifth Generation pageantry than anything by Zhang Yimou or Chen Kaige.
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