(Taiwan, 105 min.)
Dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Writ. Chu Tien-Wen, Hsieh Hai-Meng,
Zhong Acheng
Starring: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Zhou Yun, Satoshi Tsumabuki
Wuxia films can be
a grand affair as marital arts masters and soaring swordsmen trade blows and
defend their honour in elaborate action sequences and set pieces. Take Ang
Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
arguably the best martial arts film ever made, which flies to fantastical
heights as warriors cross swords in duels that play like treetop ballet, or
Zhang Yimou’s Hero, another
gorgeously realized film about the futility of living by the sword. Add Hou
Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin to the
list of notable wuxia films, but this
one stands out for very different reasons: it barely contains any action.
Call it a pacifist action film, maybe. It's an acquired taste despite the gorgeous packaging.
The Assassin, Taiwan’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film in this year’s Oscar race, is more gorgeous than any film this year frame by frame. The detail of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s masterfully ornate recreation of 9th century China is immaculate and the filmmaker transports audiences to a place and time that’s wonderfully cinematic. The film—aesthetically, anyways—is grand.
Every fame of the film is deadly gorgeous thanks to
cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing and his ability to make the colours of the
natural greenery pop out like darts fired by trained killers. (A fight
among birch bark, for example, is a beautiful killer.) The elaborate costumes
and sets by Hwrang Wern-Ying vividly recreate the old world with a perfect eye
for detail. Not one element of the elegance of 9th Century China is
spared. The score by Lim Giong is both elegant and ominous with measured notes
in the lower scale drumming a layer of tension that the story often lack, while
the phenomenal sound design has the senses on alert from all direction as one
hears slight cues that signal danger and death. The direction times the action precisely and uses all the elements at the film's disposal to set up every shot beautifully. Every piece of The Assassin’s technical and artistic
work is faultless.
The film opens with a gorgeous black and white prelude and
then converts to a vibrantly coloured drama shot mostly in the Academy ratio of
1.33:1 as The Assassin follows a
young girl named Yinniang (Shu Qi) receives training from a nun to become an
assassin. Yinniang is stealthy and deadly, but she botches an assignment early
in the film. She has a code and the film shows that won’t kill a man with a
child in his arms. She’s an anomaly among assassins.
Yinniang’s new task becomes a cruel punishment when the nun
sends her back to her home country with an assignment to kill her cousin, Tian
Ji’an (Chang Chen), the governor of the province. The Assassin plays out Yinniang’s assignment with measured
theatricality as the performances, particularly the male advisors of the court,
draw out the elements of drama and storytelling of the period in which the film
is situated. The film dances around the action and teases the confrontations
between Yinniang and Tian Ji’an, which makes the film more of a moral fable
than an action film. The few marital arts scenes that appear in the film often
leave much to be desired. Shot with barely any close-ups, The Assassin rejects the blow-for-blow intensity of its peers and
the visceral escapism of action-based entertainment. Hou Hsiao-Hsien opts for a
more philosophical approach to the world of the sword. The Assassin finds a code of honour in Yinniang’s keen intuition for
when to wield her sword and when to retire it. The film advocates against
violence by withholding it from the film and downplaying its role in the wuxia world.
The pacifism of The
Assassin is admirable, but the calculations of the storytelling don’t match
the technical and artistic prowess. Simply put: The Assassin is unbearably slow. The docility of the film is too
much. It’s almost taxing. People talk about action and inaction, but nothing much happens and the first half of the film almost passes as an unintelligible blur. The Assassin is almost defiantly slow. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s rejection of close-ups also
backfires with its distancing effect, as the film becomes cold and uninvolving
even as remains intoxicatingly beautiful. This beautifully boring film, like
the assassin at its core, is an anomaly.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Assassin opens in Ottawa at The Mayfair on Nov. 14.
It’s currently
screening in Toronto at TIFF Lightbox.
