MAN OF TAI CHI directed by Keanu Reeves, written by Michael G. Cooney, with Tiger Chen and Reeves. An eOne release. 105 minutes. Opens Friday (November 1). For times, see listings.
Keanu Reeves has a very Keanu Reevesian way of responding to things.
In answer to a question (admittedly a long, sort of rambling one) I ask him during TIFF about whether his directorial debut, Man Of Tai Chi, is meant to directly address the evacuation of spirituality and the intensification of violence in contemporary martial arts, Reeves offers a simple “Uh, yeah.”
That flat, mimbo-ish cadence that’s stoked Reeves impressions for nearly 30 years makes it obvious that Keanu Reeves, director, is very much the same Keanu Reeves we’ve come to expect: weird, funny, oddly unknowable, a Hollywood sensei possessed of a rare tranquility, the sort of guy who dances to the beat of his own drum.
With Man Of Tai Chi, in which he also co-stars as a ruthless fight promoter, Reeves’s catalogue of odd career choices continues. While it might not seem that strange for the guy who helped re-energize martial arts films in Hollywood via the super-popular Matrix trilogy to make a fight movie of his own, Man Of Tai Chi (a co-production of Chinese, Hong Kong and U.S. backers starring stuntman Tiger Chen) is anything but a surefire hit.
For one thing, it relies on tai chi, a martial art better known in the West as a light cardiovascular fitness regimen than a fists-of-fury method of self-defence. But for Reeves, tai chi proved naturally cinematic.
“There are so many things about tai chi that are fantastic for drama,” he says. “It deals so much in opposites and contrast: the idea of hard force and soft force, about taking someone’s energy, or giving energy, the idea of light and dark, yin and yang.”
Indeed, Man Of Tai Chi lays out the whole good/evil, yin/yang dichotomy with the obviousness of the white hats and black hats of old Hollywood westerns. He and Chen are even dressed in black and white respectively on the film’s poster.
Beyond the dualities of tai chi, and martial arts more broadly, Reeves found inspiration for his film across the spectrum. Man Of Tai Chi, he says in a another perfectly Reevesian turn of phrase, “took a lot of cinema.”
His fixed shots were influenced by Michael Haneke, his more elaborate moving shots by “Italian cinema.” His film also employs “jump cuts, triple cuts, crossing the line” and scenes with no cuts at all.
Listening to Reeves describe his movie is like listening to an excitable film school student rattling off the glossary from Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction. His enthusiasm is contagious and electric even if his film is as interminably flat as his inflection.
johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000
