Following New York Film Festival screening of The Go Master/Wu Qingyuan, Tian Zhuangzhuang conferred long with his young translator before the jean-dressed Beijing director responded that, no, he had not been tempted to use snips of archival footage to flesh out context, for his story dealt with truth, “the way of spirit,” “human relationships common to all men,” and was thus supra-historical, after all.

The difficulty, however, is not tied to whether or not viewers come armed with knowledge of mid-century Japanese culture or, in particular, the thinking and protocol surrounding the three-millennia-old game of go, or i-go, introduced into Tokyo five hundred years ago. The game is not shown so much as heard in the sharp clack against silence of a counter being selected from others or placed on the solid table-board of three hundred sixty-one intersections of nineteen vertical by horizontal lines. Like the press-industry Q&A, what is vocalized (or imaged) is inadequate to express the intangible, inward, mental, emotional and spiritual that Tian would convey, and characters are so stoic and expressionless to our eyes that faces and actions fail, as well.

A lamentable truth, non-Asian viewers will be sorely pressed to differentiate, let alone keep straight, players’ faces and names. Quick cuts and brief scenes further complicate what is going on, where, with whom. In contrast, for example, Bergman does not dwell on the board, either, for The Seventh Seal knight Block’s chess challenge against Death, but the lives and the stakes are patently pictured away from that contest.

Following three years’ preparation but not speaking the language or having previously worked in Japan -- hence, two “assistant directors” -- his script translated from Chinese and with mixed Chinese-Japanese crews and cast, Tian opens his film with a few seconds of his real-life hero at ninety, with wife Nakahara Kazuko, visited by the actor who will play him onscreen.

Still speaking “terrible Japanese, old-style, heavily accented,” that protagonist is Wu Qingyuan (Chang Chen). Born in China shortly after the abdication of the last, Ch’ing Manchu emperor, he was a go prodigy who, on his father’s early death, supported the family with that skill. Go had for a century enjoyed the special status of government support in Japan, where tournaments and official rankings were instituted in 1924. Four years later, his talent already recognized there, the boy and his mother Shu Wen (Sylvia Chang) emigrate across the Sea of Japan, where he soars in the official rankings and co-writes a popular introduction to new tactics.

One hundred seven minutes do not much clarify the rest of his life, spent in Japan, although two general strands do emerge prior to a 1961 accident that deprived the legendary master of his concentration and led to virtual retirement and isolation, while friends and rivals grew old and passed away. The first of these is his adopted homeland’s growing bellicosity in the ‘thirties, its seizure of Manchuria, subsequent takeover of ports and railroads, and invasion of China proper. Anti-Chinese sentiment pressures him as an alien to make a political statement by applying for naturalization, he suffers the first of the tuberculosis collapses severe enough to necessitate extended sanatorium rest, and -- the second thread -- seeking the spiritual composure that “drew [Tian] to him in the first place,” he joins the first of successive quasi-philosophical religious groups to which he and his wife would briefly subscribe.

Abrupt half-minutes of so many scenes prevents Wang Yu’s photography from realizing its promised serenity and beauty, just as such abbreviated segments do not allow for graphic plot progression, either. The Buddhism-Shintoism struggle and national vacuum following the collapse of Emperor worship in 1945, are touched, but not followed through on, in Jiu Kyou, the millenarian cult commandeered by self-proclaimed living goddess Jikou Son (Minami Kaho).

Neither characterization nor motivation is consecutive enough to be clear. If individual and personal never gels, so, too, are outside events writ small -- a few frames of a dozen civilians running from foreground flames do not call up the firebombing holocaust; if Hiroshima did not figure in a subtitle, an interior flash would not blare August 6, 1945, nor is the viewer even made aware of a separation from Kazuko (Itou Ayumi), the reasons for it or for a later reunion, or of the fate of Shu Wen in China. Unstated rather than low-key, all is guesswork, and slow, even to a contemplated suicide whose reasons and abandonment are beyond Westerners and maybe Asians as well. 

(Released by Fortissimo Films; not rated by MPAA.)