![]() Salzman is no Bruce Lee, and "Iron & Silk" is no "Lionheart" or even "The Karate Kid." Who needs more of that noisy nonsense? Its most remarkable quality is its gentleness and lack of violence. His scenes with his English class of mostly middle-aged Chinese are quiet sparklers, but his finest acting is in the early scenes, in which he must convince us that he is a novice at wushu. Sun cast Salzman as himself, and as she told the audience at Tuesday's Washington premiere, he's "not a professional actor, but he's a remarkable person, very talented - and a real ham."īlond, blue-eyed Salzman has a puppyish, John Boy-quality and goofy grin, and if he can be faulted for anything, it's for trying too hard to be appealing. He found a country of contradictions, where the gates are ostensibly open to Westerners, but the deep grooves of ancient ways, and the still-fresh memories of the Cultural Revolution, daunted Salzman's sunny American eagerness. In return, Salzman indulged his longtime love of the martial arts and found a master teacher of wushu, the martial-arts movement known here as kung fu. It's based on the book by Mark Salzman, who went to China to teach English for four years under a Yale exchange, hoping to "talk to one-fourth of mankind - one or two at a time, of course." And that is what director/producer/co-writer Shirley Sun ("A Great Wall") has achieved in her simply-sketched film. "Kung fu," by the way, means "to do something with a skill that transcends surface mastery," we're told. It's a funny, lyrical vision of captivating and confusing China as seen through a Westerner's eyes. This modest charmer, a true sleeper, is by no means a kung fu flick. Let's get it out of the way right up front: "Iron & Silk" is a martial arts movie.
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