The Ashtray of Time

The Weinsteins have a long and ignominious history of cutting the foreign films they acquire--particularly the ones from Asia--and it's sometimes difficult to divorce the film as presented to an American audience from the film that the filmmakers actually made. The ending--and some might say, the point--of Jackie Chan's Drunken Master II was excised wholesale back in the bad old days of Miram-ax, but even highbrow arthouse auteurs are not immune. Zhang Yimou's Hero is subtly different in its American incarnation than it is in its original Chinese version. Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster (2013) has the misfortune of falling victims to the Weinsteins, and given the film's very real problems with its continuity and its habit of eliding huge gulps of exposition with title cards, one has to wonder to what extent the film on the screen is what Wong intended or what he has negotiated with Harvey Weinstein. This question is compounded by the film's international history, in which Wong himself has submitted variant cuts from territory to territory. One of those versions is rumored to be four hours long. The film's provenance makes the task of assigning blame very difficult, because what was on the screen when I finally saw it was a mess.

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