MOVIE REVIEW : ‘GO MASTERS’ LINKS CHINA AND JAPAN

The first Sino-Japanese co-production, “The Go Masters” (at the Vista), is an enjoyable, old-fashioned, heart-tugging epic about how World War II affects two families--one Chinese, one Japanese--who are linked by an ancient chess-like game called go , which originated in China about 1,700 years before Christ but has become the national game of Japan.

It opens at the end of the war with a middle-age Chinese (Sun Dao-Lin) going to a devastated Japan to seek the son he has not seen in 15 years. As his ship approaches its destination, we’re flashed back to 1924 when Sun, the go champion of Southern China, has a chance encounter with a famed Japanese go player (Rentaro Mikuni), who in turn discovers that Sun’s little boy has a genius for the game and is eager to take him back to Japan to train him to become a master.

Even though China is beginning to experience civil unrest, Sun resists sending him abroad until the situation worsens in the early ‘30s, forcing him to decide that the boy will be better off in Japan. But soon Japan makes its move against Manchuria, and the lot of a Chinese living in Japan becomes difficult indeed.

Released in China in 1982, “The Go Masters” was made to commemorate the first decade of renewed friendship between China and Japan. For years Japan has turned to the screen in an attempt to come to terms with its invasion of Manchuria and its subsequent precipitation of the war in the Pacific, and the masterpiece on this subject is Masaki Kobayashi’s great nine-hour anti-war trilogy, “The Human Condition” (1958-60). Aiming for the broadest audience possible, “The Go Masters” is not nearly as sophisticated or profound as the Kobayashi work, but it is in the same familiar Japanese attempt at expiation. To be sure, while the Japanese are atoning for their sins against the Chinese, the Chinese are criticizing their own pre-revolutionary past. The game of go , which is played with black and white stones on a checkerboard, becomes symbolic of the two nations’ ability to renew ties through a shared passion for atonement.

Rentaro Mikuni is a major veteran star of Japanese films, and there is every reason to assume that Sun Dao-Lin enjoys a similar status in China. They both lend the film considerable dignity and pathos. Predictably, Mikuni’s daughter and Sun’s son become star-crossed lovers.

A joint effort in the fullest sense, “The Go Masters” boasts dual credits in every category, starting with co-directors Junya Sato and Duan Ji-Shun, whose efforts are seamless as they tell an essentially simple, tragic but finally redemptive story against a very broad canvas crowded with incident and turmoil and spanning more than three decades. Shot in ravishing color, “The Go Masters” is gorgeous to behold and is an awesome accomplishment in regard to its scale and rich, authentic-seeming period settings in both China and Japan. A most evocative score by Hikaru Hayashi and Jiang Ding-Xian goes a long way toward helping us respond emotionally to Mikuni, Sun and their kin as individuals instead of as representatives of the film’s theme of international brotherhood. “The Go Masters” (Times-rated Mature because it’s too intense for children) is propaganda that is at once respectable and entertaining.