Wu Qingyuan

This film offers a very dull chronicle of the biography of a legendary Go player. The main character appears very flat: his life is dedicated entirely to the game of Go and to his religious faith. Since neither of these is presented in any detail, it is hard for a viewer who is not familiar with them beforehand to understand what he's about. His interactions with the film's love interest, whom he ends up marrying, are as flat as the rest of it; reading a note elicits some emotion from him but her presence does not. The film has a very episodic feel, leaping from one scene and context to the next without much continuity. It sometimes feels like the historical /political events of the period command more attention than the protagonist but they are not explained or narrated as they would be in a documentary. The film boasts good photography and a few scenes of interest but I found it consistently vapid on the whole.

The movie tells the life story of one of the greatest Go players of all time: Wu Qingyuan, more famous under the name Go Seigen. If chess is like a swimming competition in the swimming hall. Go is like a race in the ocean sea.

This movie is easily overlooked. First it is in Chinese only. Secondly it is about the ancient board game Go. However it isn't really about Go. The images are beautiful, the film is slow paced. But it's not a slow-paced art-house movie (like 'the Assassin'), it is about dedicating ones life to a certain task, and to this task only. The film shows phases in Wu Qingyuan's life where he is struggling with his inner fears, where he abandoned Go, but ultimately is drawn back. He's afraid of giving it his all, and receiving nothing in return. He is drawn back because it has become his life. This movie could be about any kind of sport, or any kind of story about a men who faces great adversity with greater passion.

Someone once said, the more specific something is, the more universal it becomes. It couldn't be more true.

The life of Go master Wu Qingyan who came to Japan from China in the 1930's (?) to train at a Go academy. The narrative spans the time from those early beginnings, through the invasion of China by Japan, Japan's defeat to the US, the difficult post-war years, and ending with Wu suffering an accident that terminated his career playing in Go competitions. If those tumultuous times were not enough, Wu had to cope with a pernicious case of TB.

You don't need to know the rules of Go, but even to a neophyte player, the moves and board positions depicted throughout look real. Contrast this to the brain-dead depiction of chess playing you see in many movies. Credit goes to a Dan-5 (Go player's rating) consultant.

Whether you understand the game or not, you marvel first at the utter simplicity of the empty board, the curved black and white stones, the satisfying sound they make when smacked into position, and then at the complex patterns of black and white covering the board during the end game. To that aesthetic add the great decorum and unhurried ceremony of the games between grandmasters. It fits perfectly with the narrative, acting, and camera work: formal and beautiful.

An element of the story escaped me at first: the nature of Wu's faith. I must have missed something early in the film, but near the end it is made clear that the religious sect he belongs to is Jiko.

The film is dedicated to master Wu and his wife (Kasuko?). The opening scene is shot in Odawara (?) in 2004, presumably showing the real Wu.

Some people take this movie dull and slow-paced. The truth is that on the contrary it goes very fast, blitz.

Maestro Wu leads a legendary life and dominated the Go world for at least twenty years. He beat every single possible Go player and finished the famous Jubango, in total twelve tournaments, ten games per tournament. All these were condensed to one scene, one passage, one sentence in the movie. The last battle scene against the Honinbo Takagawa. It shows how the director arranged the movie and what he targeted on. Not win or lose, but belief (faith) and Go which supported Wu along the life path and armed him for the inevitable turmoil.

You will find the same set-up again and again, a shabby house. Yet watch closely that the tone color changes and becomes bright when Wu was mentally reborn. And then the beautiful Japan seashore as in the painting.

Wu's mentor said, as a Go player, you should die on the board. It is him who insisted the Honinbo tournament should be held during the war time.You will find the game in Hiroshima went on right after the bombing. In a sense a Go player is a samurai fighting on the board. He must obey the honor code.

Yet a Go player has to retire or retreat once he is not able to win. A very cruel fact Wu had to accept. Then he became a mentor and eventually an ordinary man, who lives peacefully. No more wars, Wu reconciled with himself and the movie leads us back to the first scene philosophically.

The drawback of the movie is that it IS fragmented. It introduces a lot of people without even telling you their names. I highly doubt that if you are not familiar with Wu, you can recognize who is who, for example, Kita Fumiko in the beginning of the movie. Though it is not the main point at all, since the director cut all the dramatic parts of Wu's achievements.

The movie is centered around how to be stern and humble. It is universal; the director used Go as an interface and Wu as an example.

I as a mathematician want to remind you that the Go rules are simple yet there are no matching models. It is much harder a problem than Chess. Currently we only know the ending part. See http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Go-Chilling-Gets- Point/dp/1568810326/ref=sr_1_1? s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375725931&sr=1-1&keywords=berlekamp+go.

Wu Qingyuan was born in China but has lived most of his life in Japan. Perhaps the greatest twentieth-century player of Go, the chess-like (but simpler and more ancient) territorial game of lenticular black and white stones on the grid square of a big wooden board. Wu was a Go prodigy, and his early victories led him to Japan at the age of fourteen. He dominated the game for over a quarter-century. This beautiful, sedately-paced film is based on his autobiography.

Tian's film is very Zen. You will learn nothing about Go from it and little about Wu (known as Go Seigen in Japan; curiously as "Go-sa"—it makes him sound like "Mr. Go"). What you will get is a meditative but at times noisy visual poem starring the young Taiwanese actor Chang Chen, male lead of Hou Hsiau-hsien's Three Times, focused on a stoical, restrained, silent man who with quiet devotion pursued the game of Go and Faith, those two goals of competition and the spiritual quest, and little else, all of his life, among all the physical and mental challenges he faced and all the events of a turbulent century. The stern, clean-faced Chang's coolly intense performance, which rivets our attention at the film's center at all times, is a milestone in his career and shows him to be one of the strongest new Chinese film actors today. Chang knew a little Japanese prior to filming but for Tian this project imposed the discipline of shooting in a language of which he knew nothing. But Tian had Japanese assistant directors and production assistants he trusted and as he said in an interview, "Go players don't talk very much anyway." Nonetheless he acknowledges this was "very hard," similar to the problems faced by Hou in making Café Lumiere in Japan. Tian contemplated this project for a long time, and read Wu's autobiography shortly after returning to film-making following the nine-year break that followed The Blue Kite. Tian knows his own hardships. The realistic portrayal of the long period of the Cultural Revolution, its prelude and aftermath in the richly detailed Kite led to his being barred from film-making for years by the Chinese authorities.

Wu lived in Japan during the unstable and violent Thirties and Forties. He was playing a tournament on Hiroshima when it was bombed. According to the film, the referee instructs the players to play on in the wrecked room. Wu suffered periodically from tuberculosis. Its residual effects exempted him from military service. He married a Japanese woman named Kazuko, who's still with him (we glimpse the ninety-something, still vigorous Wu himself briefly at the film's opening). Wu's alive and well now, but in 1955 he was in a motor accident that caused him to stop playing. In his autobiography he wrote of this event that the God of competition abandoned him. Yet he still studies Go with passion.

The film is punctuated with titles denoting major events in Wu's life, along with a statement from his autobiography. Wu's pursuit of faith and search for relief from the intense mental stress of Go tournaments led him to join several religious cults, which are depicted in the film.

After Tian returned to film-making his first work was the relatively apolitical, Ibsenesque Springtime in Another Town. The Go Master might be a safe way of returning to politics and history, by approaching it through an apolitical man who lived in another country. But Tian never was never a stranger to controversy. His own vicissitudes and his growing maturity may simply have led him to respect a man devoted to the pursuit of inner goals.