From the first shot to the last, when the assassin leads a group of peasants into the majestic wilderness of Tang Dynasty China, this is likely to be the most ravishing film you'll see in a long while. The swift tumult of fabric, the heart-bleeding colours, the luxuriant verdant of the forest -- The Assassin, shot on 35mm at a time when almost every film in the world is shot on digital, is also a martial arts drama that compels us to rethink the essence of the genre. Historically regarded as a cheap, sweaty form of entertainment, the wuxia film has reached the pinnacle of high-art in this Taiwanese production -- and some audiences will certainly feel baffled, if not exasperated.
There are swordplay and ambushes, assassination waylays and high-flying tussles, but these beautiful fights take place in small bursts, erupting and dying quickly, or sometimes evaporating with a graceful rhythm. The Assassin, by Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, is an extension of the director's poetic study in the way cinema can capture time, and in the delicate gestures of human relationships. Martial arts movies are famous for their speed; Hou rewires the rules and gives us a slow, contemplative, intensely observant film that also has its moments of anger and heartache.
The assassin of the title is Nie Yinniang, played by Hou's regular Shu Qi. In midnight-black costume, she is sent by her teacher (a nun!) to kill a brash provincial governor Tian Ji'an (Chang Chen), a prince who was once betrothed to her. In 9th century China, palace politics is often tangled with personal rapport, orders with feelings, while the opulence of the court is a contrast to the outlying poverty. The Assassin isn't trying to be obvious about any of this, but its breathtaking elegance goes beyond the visuals and into the context of the era. In a strange narrative structure, the plot is explained in a few scenes that contain very long conversations between characters, with the camera static, and often with a sophisticated framing that suggests the intricate layers of doubts and feelings. And if you can't follow the motif of the characters, or understand every action and twist, don't feel anxious. The Assassin resembles a poem, and sometimes you don't have to fully understand poetry to appreciate its beauty.
Fifteen years ago, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revived the interest in the wuxia fighting movies; it won the Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film, and was a box office hit almost everywhere in the world. Despite that film's finesse and an emphasis in the human dimension, its appeal relied very much on the fight choreography, the gravity-defying swashbuckling on wispy bamboo tops -- also the gender politics embodied in its prime assassin played by the young Zhang Ziyi. In 2004, Ziyi again starred in House of Flying Daggers, another high-budget wuxia saga with exciting, photogenic battle in the lavish Chinese court. And as recently as 2013, Wong Kar-wai enthralled us with The Grandmaster, again starring Ziyi as a feisty warrior in a smoky pre-war China; the film was also a moving story of lost love in the lost era, set amid scenes of masterfully deconstructed hand-to-hand combat.
Those three films -- all shown in Thailand to varying degrees of popularity -- are examples of how "art house directors" have striven to elevate the status of cultish artefacts of the Shaw Brothers era. And while each of them are intelligent and appealing in its own way, The Assassin seems to have stretched the possibility of such attempt even further: in this ancient terrain of splendid natural beauty, the men and women are melancholic souls with conflicted desires and motifs, and when they have to fight, it feels like an expression of sadness rather than fury. Hou's stylistic formalism is world-renowned -- here's one of the most respected filmmakers at work and one of the pioneers of the Taiwanese New Wave in the early 1980s -- and his pensive patience, the way he allows us to feel the slow drift of time, feels like he has unlocked the occult magic of cinema and its effects on our perception of the image on screen.
All of this means that, well, many people will find The Assassin too meditative -- too "boring", which can be the same adjective used by the detractors of, say, the last Transformers mess. Slow cinema has become the butt of many jokes lately, as well as a target of cynical dumbing-down by the dominant force of popcorn movies. Let's just say here that variety of choices is what makes our cinema spectatorship healthy, and The Assassin, which pushes the boundaries and stereotypes of martial arts film, is a striking work whose arrival at our multiplexes should be saluted, or at the very least welcome.
