Ip Man (Yip Man) Review

Given his status as a master practitioner and populariser of the Chinese kung fu style known as wing chun, and as a great teacher whose students included cinema's most famous martial artist Bruce Lee, it is remarkable that Ip Kai-Man (who died in 1972) has been spared cinematic study for so long, although perhaps the man's famous modesty made him unsuitable material for movie heroism.

Recently, however, there have been two attempts to turn Ip Man into a viable film project. Wong Kar-wai's The Grand Master, set to star Wong regular Tony Leung, has been in development since around 2001, and is currently scheduled for release in 2010 - but for anyone who cannot hold out for the arthouse king's take on the martial artist's life, Wilson Yip's 2008 film Ip Man provides what is no doubt a more conventional stopgap.

In perhaps the most memorable scene of Yip's film, Ip Man (Donnie Yen) is interrupted in his increasingly violent 'friendly' duel with trouble-making northern master Jin (Fan Siu-Wong) by the surreal appearance of his young son Zhun (Li Ze) on a tricycle, who declares: "Dad, Mum said if you don't stop fighting, everything in the house will be broken." Sure enough, the film focuses on Man's early career in his native Foshan, where his fighting prowess and natural teaching talents are constantly kept in check by domestic considerations, and more particularly by the jealous disapproval of his wife Cheung Wing-sing (Lynn Hung) - until, that is, the Japanese invade China and Man's fighting skills become a vehicle for national pride and unity against a group of 'out-of-towners' far more threatening than Jin will ever be.

The presence of young Zhun in this and many other scenes suggests an eyewitness veracity to the events as portrayed on-screen - after all, Zhun himself, now a much older man and a wing chun master in his own right, served as a consultant on Ip Man. The film, however, does not hesitate to sacrifice the truth to the demands of dramatic entertainment. The real Ip Man was never, despite the film's assertions to the contrary, forced from bourgeois idleness into work by the hardships of the Second Sino-Japanese War, nor was he ever employed as a coolie in a colliery - rather he chose of his own accord to work as a policeman (a profession lightly ridiculed within the film) before the Japanese invasion, and he continued in this line for several years after the war until Communist disapproval of his wealth and political affiliations drove him into voluntary exile in Hong Kong (an inconvenient truth that the film elides as tactfully as Ip Man mitigates the impact of his own victories). While, during the war, Ip Man did indeed refuse to teach his martial arts to the military police of the occupying Japanese - a decision which eventually forced him to flee Foshan - he certainly never had, let alone won, a duel with a Japanese general (played in the film by Hiroyuki Ikeuchi).