Once in a blue moon there comes along a film made by a recognized and established director that not only baffles but barely can be described. Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Horse Thief and, more recently, Springtime in a Small Town) directs one of the oddest biopics ever made from what must be the world’s most terse biographical script by Chang Ah. The Go Master purports to cover the life of the 20th century’s greatest Go player, Wu Qingyuan (Chang Chen), from when he was born in China in 1911 until he retires from playing in Japan in 1987. Wu practiced an apparently highly ascetic life devoted, at first, to playing Go, and secondly to funneling his religious faith through a series of sects that at one point conflict with the game, only to eventually regress back to the search for an amalgram that embraces the two. Playing continually in the background of this dedicated life are Sino-Japanese relations, as much of Wu’s career, while taking place in Japan, also coincides with Japan’s imperialist aggression into China. In a completely unconventional and initially quite intriguing manner, Tian and Ah follow two or three scenes of the film with a brief title card explaining the action of that period in Wu’s life, also followed by a quote from the man himself commenting on that timespan. The scenes themselves are mere slivers wherein little happens from a limited point of view and during most of which Wu is completely impassive. The Go Master avoids drama, characterization, dramatic narration, conflict, and narrative clarity. What is created in their place is…not clear. Beautifully shot by Wang Yu, the film in essence presents a series of intimate tableaux of banality, that is, Wu’s outwardly lived life. Tian shoots in zoomed-in medium shots that slowly pan or track around a composition which subtly closes off the mise-en-scčne in a way that emphasizes somberness, nostalgia, and the limitations of recollection inherent in a biopic period piece. But unlike in the work of Hou Hsiou-hsien, of which both the visual and narrative style of The Go Master has a great deal in common, the banalities that Tian shoots and Ah writes never add up and for the most part the history is a framing device with little thematic import (although it does provide for an amazing visual shorthand in Tian’s filming of the atomic bomb blast from the limited perspective of a quiet room for Go, the walls going white and the blast displacing the players, who are then ordered to go on with the game). Emphasized is neither story nor relationships nor even the game of Go—from a literal and practical standpoint, nor as a metaphor; it exists merely a signifier for devotion. Tian seems to be focusing on the spiritual dedication of Wu Qingyuan, which approaches such an extreme asceticism that everything else in his world (and the film) is suppressed to the utmost of inexpressibility. This is also combined with an attitude to the history in the background of the film and the “normal” biopic purpose of illustrating a life lived by instead emphasizing that a life remembered is nothing but interiority. Wu remembers what he felt like at a particular moment and the specificities around that feeling blur out and become vague in recollection, and all that remain are scenes of him just being there, in the moment. The result is a completely dull picture, one wherein little seems to be seen or happen. Everything is elided or suppressed to such a degree that nothing is left but suggestions so basic—like Wu’s dedication or the vague Sino-Japanese relationship—that they lose all meaning. Drained of expressivity and specificity, of texture and context, Wu’s life seems to suggest nothing at all, an ineffable existence searching for something so intangible and abstract (perfection in Go, faithful dedication) that the world and life around him remain just as allusive. The film is an exquisite object of effacement, of the suppressed and elimination of what defines a life, honing it down to qualities so interior and particular that their inexpression on the screen seems an ode to the limitations of cinematic representation.