“When my father went to the market, I always thought he was a threat to you. I’ve only learned now that you were a threat to him.” Set in martial arts hotspot Tianjin in 1920, nothing is ever quite as it seems in Xu Haofeng & Xu Junfeng’s 100 Yards (门前宝地, ménqián bǎodì). As a young man replies, everyone has their part to play in keeping the peace, or at least some sort of balance that allows the city to function while otherwise caught between declining colonial interests, warlords, crooks and the old world represented by Shen’s house of kung fu.
The struggle is in essence one of which way to lean. Old master Shen is dying. He must choose a successor and is stuck between his only son, An (Jacky Heung Cho), thought to be of insufficient skill, and his best apprentice, Quan (Andy On). Shen orders the two men to fight while he watches from his deathbed and admonishes each of them for holding back. Finally he tells Quan to beat An decisively or he’ll never learn and will simply be beaten by better masters later on. Quan knocks An out with a neck blow and inherits the school, but his management style immediately rankles former right-hand woman Chairmen Meng (Li Yuan).
Part of old Shen’s job had been to patrol the marketplace discouraging hoodlums from extorting the traders, but what An comes to realise is that it’s more like he cut a deal with them in which they permitted the illusion he controlled the gangs while he in turn turned a blind eye and allowed them to practice their art while wasn’t around. Everyone has their part to play, and like the 100-yard boundary around the martial arts school, it has clearly defined yet unspoken borders. Quan threatens these by recruiting hoodlums and Westerners into the martial arts society blurring what should be a hard barrier between martial artist and thug. He paints this as modernisation and egalitarianism, that he’s deliberately recruiting people from all walks of life so that they might all walk towards the future together. But in reality, Quan is merely a dictator in waiting quietly building up a personal power base that would make him unassailable in the martial arts world or otherwise.
An, meanwhile, has the desire to reclaim this space as one of greater nobility that keeps violence off the streets and settles disputes in gentlemanly fashion behind closed doors. Those who are defeated in a fair fight accept the results and consequences of their trial by combat with grace and honour. An signals his desire to leave the mainstream world and return to that of the Martial Arts Circle by breaking up with his longterm girlfriend Xia (Kuo Bea-ting) to pursue martial artist Gui Ying (Tang Shiyi) who is then also pursued by Quan in the belief she may know of the rumoured Fourth Fist Style of Shen’s family taught to her as a kind of safeguard against his eventual betrayal of the martial society.
Xia is also caught between two worlds in that she is the illegitimate daughter of the Frenchman who runs the bank where Shen got An a job hoping that he would leave the martial arts world to live a “normal” life. Beaten by Quan, he takes the job and begins dressing in Western-style suits but is outraged when Xia’s father forces him to fight his bodyguards for the amusement of his guests. Tearing off his tie, he quits the job and goes back to wearing traditional Chinese dress while Quan, now essentially behaving like a mob boss, starts wearing colourful suits and sunglasses while taking violence to the streets and leading An to fight henchmen one by one until finally reaching him for their final confrontation. He forces An to fight with two short sabres with which he is unfamiliar in revenge for their previous duel in which Quan elected to use them falsely believing that this was Shen’s rumoured Fourth Fist technique which may not actually have existed.
In any case, An’s is then a battle of adjustment and acclimatisation in which he must learn to use these new tools on the go just as each of the men must learn to find an accommodation with rapidly changing 1920s society. The Xus’ action choreography is precise and complex, thrilling in its unpredictability while certain in its intent. The aim of the Martial Arts Circle is to minimise violence and so blows are often bated, we don’t need to see the connection because the winner is obvious. But there’s also a rawness and poignancy to the battle between An and Quan over a paternal legacy, the abandoned son yearning for acceptance and the talented apprentice nevertheless insecure in his master’s approval. The martial arts world is over, the conclusion seems to say, or in another way, perhaps it has only just begun as An begins his new life as a defender of a 100-yard fiefdom in a reclaimed post office just shy of its borders.
100 Yards is released Feb. 18 in the US on blu-ray and DVD courtesy of Well Go USA.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 