By A. O. SCOTT for THE NEW YORK TIMES
OCT. 15, 2015
Review: ‘The Assassin' Finds Delight in a Deadly Vocation
"The Assassin” is a stately action movie, graceful and slow-moving, with bursts of smoothly choreographed violence. Apart from those moments, the film unfolds almost like a series of exquisite paintings: landscapes and interiors composed with an exacting eye, every shape and color measured and placed according to a rigorous aesthetic.
The eye in question belongs to Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the Taiwanese filmmaker whose work, over more than 30 years, is a catalog of visual beauty and formal innovation. "The Assassin,” which won the prize for best director at Cannes in May, certainly exhibits both of those qualities. It is as gorgeous to behold as anything you are likely to encounter on a movie screen or a museum wall. And it's a reminder that Mr. Hou, many of whose recent films have found mystery, sensuality and artistic possibility in modern cities (Tokyo in "Café Lumiere,” Paris in "Flight of the Red Balloon”), is also a master at imagining the past.
"The Assassin” takes place in ninth-century China, and concerns the consequences of a provincial rebellion against imperial authority. But the history being explored is less political than cinematic. Mr. Hou's interest in the movie past is evident in frequent acts of homage — "Café Lumière,” for example, is, among other things, a loving and gently critical meditation on the legacy of the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu — and here he joins a growing list of filmmakers embracing wuxia, the medieval sword-fighting genre that is in many ways a Chinese analog of the American western.
You could say that Mr. Hou is satisfying his inner nerd, or perhaps experimenting with the constraints and conventions of genre filmmaking. And for cinephiles of a certain temperament, "The Assassin” will be pure catnip: an auteurist artifact with sumptuous costumes, simmering palace rivalries and acrobatic displays of blade-wielding virtuosity.
Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) is the title character, trained in her deadly vocation by a fierce, soft-spoken mentor and dispatched, at the start of the film, on a fateful and complicated mission. Yinniang's home province, Weibo, is in a state of revolt and factional strife, and she is ordered to kill Tian Ji'an (Chen Chang) a local potentate who is also her cousin. Yinniang, who was taken to the imperial capital as a child, receives a cordial welcome, and lurks in the shadows as various intrigues are plotted and thwarted. Imposing, almost Shakespearean themes waft through the air like smoke from the censers and braziers that are fixtures in every room.
Where do the assassin's loyalties lie? Will affection and family feeling override her professional duties? And how will her target, Ji'an, reconcile the demands of power and mercy? He seems like a thoughtful, sensitive man, but his survival may depend on his ability to be cruel and cunning.
These problems are addressed — or at least gestured at — in a series of decorous, elliptical scenes. Mr. Hou is a reluctant dramatizer, preferring the oblique indication of emotion to its direct expression. In many of his movies, the feelings that characters might be experiencing are displaced into the light, the scenery, the nuances of quiet that surround them. This can produce, in movies like "Three Times” and "Millennium Mambo,” a special kind of bliss, a sense of being moved by invisible forces that are at the same time right in front of your eyes.
"The Assassin,” in contrast, offers subdued and partial delights. It reminds you of the sublime and enigmatic power of cinematic images without quite supplying the grandeur of mystery. Mr. Hou rejects some of the traditional satisfactions of the wuxia genre — the intricate but orderly plotting; the jolts of romantic passion and vengeful rage; the kinetic excitement — without offering much in their place. The film is intriguing, but ultimately opaque, a lovely, inert object that offers, in the name of movie love, an escape from so much that is vital and interesting about movies.
The New York Times review, complete with visuals and footage, can be found here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/movies/review-the-assassin-finds-delight-in-a-deadly-vocation.html