Go Master (Screen Daily Review)

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The Go Master (Wu Qingyuan)

Lee Marshall in Rome 17 October 2006

Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang. Chi. 2006. 107mins.

The latest feature from Fifth Generation Chinese film-maker Tian Zhuangzhuang, The Go Master is an austere, poetic study of one of the most famous 20th-century players of the Japanese board game Go, considered the most complicated strategy game in the world. As reticent as its central character (played by Wong Kar-wai regular Chang Chen), this is a slow-moving arthouse title that tests the resilience of its audience.

At once inscrutable and ravishing, The Go Master builds a thematic depth out of what at first appears to be a rambling biopic structure, the theme being whether or not it is construct a personal and spiritual space that is somehow outside of history.

Shot and set partly in China and partly in Japan, this pan-Asian film features a mix of Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese actors and crew, a set-up that recalls Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumiere. Japanese interest in the exercise was confirmed during this year’s Cannes market, when SPO Entertainment picked the film up from Fortissimo (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the traditional game of Go has become sexy in Japan once more after being featured in the manga and anime series Hikaru Nu Go). It is likely to be a niche product in Japan, China and other parts of the region, with scattershot distribution beyond that.

The film is based on the memoirs of Wu Qingyuan, the Go Master of the title and now in his nineties. The dramatic nexus of the story is the fact that Wu was born in China, while Go – although it originated in China – had by the 20th century become the national board game of Japan.

A Go progidy, Wu moved to Japan in 1928, when he was just 14, taking Japanese citizenship a few years later, and gradually rose through the ranks until he was crowned the unbeatable master of the game in 1949. In the meantime, however, relations between Wu’s native and adopted countries were less than rosy, especially after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

Zhuangzhuang and scriptwriter Ah Cheng portray Wu as a painfully private, shy and ascetic man who is totally dedicated to Go. For Wu, this game of strategy – in which the two players attempt to encircle each others’ pieces – is above the real world, in a purer dimension. The clack of the oval pieces on the wooden board and the ultra-shallow focus of Wang Yu’s pin-sharp cinematography, create a space apart from the chaos outside.

With his loose, plain suits or robes, his shaved head and round priestly glasses, Wu comes across as a Buddhist monk – and in fact he is always looking for spiritual succour, most notably during the chaotic years of the war in the Pacific, when he and his young bride Nakahara (Itou Ayumi) attach themselves to the Jiu Kyou cult, one of many that proliferated in the apocalyptic climate of wartime Japan. Centre-screen captions fill us in on much of this historical baggage.

This is a taciturn film, so much so that we’re never quite sure how critical it intends to be of Wu’s passivity. Certainly, with his autistic, shuffling gait and failure to react he often comes across as a pathetic figure – but at the same time he does manage to create a stillness around himself that is arresting and often touching.

The conflict engendered by his status as a king of privileged enemy alien is played down to an almost frustrating degree, coming out only in couple of striking scenes. In one Wu is attracted by the noises of a party, only to discover that everyone is celebrating the subjugation of his homeland; and in another he prowls through the cramped and rigidly divided spaces of a Japanese domestic interior, like a wild beast who’s wandered by mistake into an Ozu movie.

The war itself mostly happens off screen - even more so than in The Pianist - and we see nothing that is going to be controversial for either Chinese or Japanese audiences, giving the countries’ shared history. It could be argued that one of The Go Master’s failings is the notion that Wu suffered nothing more than a vague identity crisis during the conflict: surely somebody who so obviously looked Chinese and had a marked Chinese accent when he spoke Japanese must have had a few problems?

Curiously, we also learn little of the rules of Go itself. The film is more interested in the priestly caste that the game created, in which respect for one’s adversary is sacrosanct (there is never any hint of direct racism towards Wu). There is also an often perverse dedication to the game, over and above the claims of life, family and history.

This is most tellingly, and exaggeratedly, conveyed in a scene where a Go master orders his charges to continue their game which has been interrupted by the little matter of an atomic bomb going off on the other side of the city.

The meditative nature of the exercise is underlined by a solo-piano and heavenly-choir soundtrack, which is as sparse as everything else – including the editing, so elliptical that we lose track, once or twice, of the logical or temporal connections between scenes. And the biopic format leads to some inertia in the rather inert final part of Wu’s life and career. But The Go Master, in its Zen way, is more memorable than the sum of these few drawbacks might suggest.

Production companies/backers
Century Hero Film Investment Co
Yeoman Bulky Corp

International sales
Fortissimo Films

Executive producers
Wang Jun
Owen Chen
Wouter Barendrecht
Michael J Werner

Producer
Liu Xiaodian

Screenplay
Ah Cheng

Cinematography
Wang Yu

Editor
Yang Hongyu

Production design
Emi Wada

Music
Zhao Li

Main cast
Chang Chen
Sylvia Chang
Matsuzaka Keiko
Emoto Akira
Itou Ayumi
Minami Kabo
Inoue Takayuki