The Final Master (Shi fu)

 Chen Shi (Liao Fan), an older Wing Chun master, arrives in Tianjin to establish a martial arts school. This means, of course, that he must defeat the masters of eight of the nineteen established dojos in the city first. Martial artists have the best bureaucracy.

 Because this is a movie written and directed by the great Haofeng Xu, though, things are rather more complicated than that. After arriving in town, Chen first meets with Zheng (Chin Shih-chieh), a local grandmaster. After duly being impressed by his skills, Zheng informs him of several wrinkles in his plans: As a foreigner, Chen can't just go around kicking everyone's ass - he'd be disqualified even if he won. So he must take on a local disciple to do it in his stead. The catch? After winning, his disciple must fight a duel with a local grandmaster, and will be banished from town no matter what the result is so the local establishment can save face.
 Zheng is pretty sure he will be the one that will be called on to duel the disciple, so he asks Chen to take him on as a secret second apprentice, and teach him everything he knows so that he runs no chance of losing the duel.

 All this is fairly simple, as far as the arcane vagaries of honor and traditions go, but don't worry, there are plenty of byzantine twists to keep things confusing.

 To keep the heat off him, Chen pretends to be a lowly commoner, and after a local waitress (Song Jia) gives him a little lip, he takes her on as his wife to help keep appearances. Chen soon finds Geng (Song Yang, Judge Archer himself), a young, uncouth coolie who turns out to be a prodigy, and starts training him in the ways of Wing Chun even though he knows that he's in it to try and steal his wife. And once Geng starts methodically trouncing all local champions, he runs afoul of Master Zou (Jiang Wenli), a delightfully evil woman who runs the city's dojos as if they were a cartel, and Lin Xiwen (Huang Jue), a ruthless colonel and a an old student of Zheng who's trying to bring the martial arts academies under the heel of the military. This is when Chen's devious plan becomes a little bit clearer.

 As with Xu's previous Judge Archer, the film basically drops you in the deep end and slowly gives you just enough information to put things together. It's hard going at times; Some of it is due to cultural remove, but now I've read a couple of translated Chinese reviews that seem similarly bewildered, I don't feel as bad. His script pays special attention to how honour and appearances bind the characters, which ironically leads them to take actions that are... less than honourable, and certainly run counter to their desires.
 It's a rich, confusing tapestry that's very rewarding to work out, but leaves the plot pretty hard to follow; I was lucky in that I watched this with my wife, who's watched a lot less Wuxia than I have, so I had to pause and try to explain what was going on a few times - these conversations and breathing space helped me work things out as I went along.

 She ended up liking it a lot, even if she gave up on fully following the plot at some point. That is largely because the major story beats are solid and dramatic, and also because the script keeps a light touch, with a lot of surprising warmth for its fully fleshed-out characters, a wry sense of humour, tight editing, some incredible visual storytelling, and... of course, a lot of excellent, varied fights.

 Xu's choreographies are quick, precise, and utterly badass - you often get the feeling that the result has been decided beforehand in the opponent's heads. This leads to an astonishing running final battle, where instead of having a protracted showoff between a handful of opponents, a single master faces a whole city's worth of martial artists in a series of minimalistic duels. It's exhilarating.

 The fights also underscore character moments, of course - there's a wonderful scene where Chen bares his soul to his wife while fending off a crowd of angry extras with a bamboo pole, daintily sitting with her in a bench, and the aforementioned final battle is both fuelled by a suitably tragic development and marks a strong character development.

 It looks beautiful, the acting is excellent, and like all of the Haofeng Xu-related movies I've seen so far it feels like there's a lot of thought and care put behind it - strong themes, wonderful characters, and a lot of humanity contortioned into strange shapes by rigid social structures and tradition. The way the plot keeps us at a distance holds it off from greatness - I'd recommend Judge Archer over this one - but it's still well worth it. 

 Sadly it's a bit of a pain to get access to Xu's other movies around these parts: his latest (100 Yards) remains without a UK release date, The Hidden Sword seems to have been completely annulled by Chinese censors for not toeing the party line, and I can only find his first (The Sword Identity) as an overpriced DVD. I'll keep at it.

Judge Archer (Jian shi liu bai yuan)

 China, 1917. Martial artists are running around the country wreaking havoc, as they usually do - either as soldiers serving many clashing warlords, or at martial arts schools. And as we know from countless martial arts movies over the years, martial arts schools aren't any better, always challenging, stealing sacred objects from, or insulting each other.

 Somewhere in the countryside, a man (Yang Song) traumatized after witnessing an atrocity is given a new lease on life by the local monks - they they allow him to drop his previous life and run out into the word cleansed; The first words he hears, they tell him, will be his new name and identity.
 As it happens, those first words are "Judge Archer!", shouted in a forest after some sort of scuffle. Our protagonist finds a wounded old man, who asks his name. When he responds "Judge Archer", the old man tells him that's his name too, and decides to take him under his wing.

 Judge Archers are, as the opening blurb informed us, the people who keep all the martial arts schools in line. Cut to six years later, and the new Judge is now a powerful martial artist; We get to see him in action for a while (he can perform his job even while blind drunk) until the plot kicks in.

 That plot involves Erdong (Yenny Martin), a femme fatale who convinces Judge to kill an old master (Chenghui Yu) who's thrown in with a powerful warlord. Judge (is it ok if I use his first name?) proves he's not being seduced into doing it by literally fighting off her advances in the bedchamber (an amazing and dryly funny fight where the main weapons end up being a length of string, a pair of knives and a chair), and then agrees to her request anyways.
 (And if that last run-on sentence doesn't sell you on the movie, I don't know what to tell you.)

 Things end up being even more complicated than they seem at first (which is plenty complicated) when a beautiful opera singer (Chengyuan Li) keeps interrupting Judge's attempts on the old man's life until he falls in love with her.

 It's a confusing, frustratingly obtuse story that keeps everybody's motivations cryptic. I'm used to just rolling with Wuxia storylines without fully understanding them, but it's especially frustrating here because you get the feeling that there's a well thought-out story full of interesting themes, sitting tantalizingly half-out of reach. It does make sense, mostly, by the end, but there's plenty of bewildering choices, hindered no doubt by cultural distance.

 On the other hand, the movie looks absolutely sumptuous. Director Xu Haofeng has an incredible eye for visuals and tying scenes together in a very compelling way; He also writes, edits and does all the choreography, which is a really impressive list of credits given how well it's all done. The art direction (by Yong Xie) and cinematography (by Tony Wang) are beautiful, and the wardrobe (by Tingting Liang) looks amazing. The film easily earns a ton of goodwill by virtue of just how good it looks and sounds (the music, by Wei An and Fan Wang, is also fantastic).
 And the acting is good. Judge Archer is a damaged weirdo prone to strange pauses, but he's a convincing, very charismatic damaged weirdo. Kuang is a great villain, believably capable and equally likeable, and both of the women are very good as well, although their roles are the most inscrutable.

 It's a thoughtful film full of quiet moments, punctuated by frequent and very cool, very varied fights. There's a series of close-up duels which have people sitting on benches, right on front of each other with their knees almost touching, relying a lot on elbows and the insides of the forearms. Other fights use the aforementioned piece of string, arrows wielded as wands, and pole fights that turn into spear fights when the combatants sharpen the tips by tapping them on a hard object. A lot of attention is paid to footwork, which is something I adore in these movies.
 All great stuff, much less flamboyant than most wuxia but still a tiny bit heightened and very imaginative.

 Set against the rise of the Chinese republic and the ensuing wane of martial arts ("there won't be another Judge Archer", someone says), the story and its themes are quietly affecting- especially when we learn of the fate of the Judge's sister, the catalyst that set the whole story into motion, and compare them to see how their lives diverged.
 Xu Haofeng is serious about all this stuff: he's a researcher into martial arts and its role in history, a well-known novelist in China, probably most famous here in the west for being one of the writers behind Kar-Wai Wong's The Grandmaster. He's appeared once in this blog already, as the writer of the novel Monk Comes Down the Mountain is based off; given just how good Judge Archer is, he will absolutely appear again.