ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA

There's a notion going around that The Assassin is a hard movie to parse out at the narrative level. This is so. I have now seen The Assassin three times, in fact, and if you were to tell me that I had to clarify what every scene contributed to the overall narrative at each point, and what the main character, Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) is up to at every point, I simply couldn't do it. There's a more-than-significant chunk of the film's audience that takes this be proof that it is, while not even necessarily "bad", at least not one of the most thrilling pieces of cinema of 2015, which is utterly silly. The Assassin is perfectly magnificent, gorgeous, heart-stopping, and deeply unnerving in its dour ambivalencies about duty and morality in China during the Tang dynasty, and it is a completely essential new entry in the great career of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, one of the greatest directors of the modern age. "Hou's best film in eight years!" I would say, breathlessly, knowing that nobody could ever disagree: Hou hasn't made any features since 2007's Flight of the Red Balloon, and it has been one of the most profoundly upsetting absences in the modern history of cinema. But even spotting that, The Assassin is, I think, his best work since the 1990s. Not that any of this as-such matters.

It is much easier to talk about the plot of The Assassin in the most general way rather than using specifics: this is the story of a singularly deadly assassin, Yinniang, who was taken as a child by Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), a nun who has trained her in the art of efficiently and ruthlessly eradicating corrupt government officials (I have my doubts that "nun" is the most apt translation, but it's what the English-speaking world has apparently contented itself with). As punishment for a moment of weakness, when she found her target with his young son, Yinniang has been tasked with the particularly morbid assignment of returning to her childhood home province, Weibo, to assassinate her cousin and former betrothed Tian Ji'an (Chang Chen), now the governor of the province and a figure of particular strategic importance in the increasingly tense political situation throughout the empire, which was at that point starting to twitch from the rumblings of widespread rebellion. This cues what I can only think of as an Imperial Chinese fantasia on Hamlet, in which Yinniang very significantly does not kill Tian Ji'an, while perpetually leaving open the door that she might.

This is frankly baffling to the viewer who enters it without a fairly effective working knowledge of the circumstances of the middle-to-late Tang Dynasty, something I fully concede to lacking; whether Chinese audiences would be likelier to have a built-in knowledge of this material, I dare not say (Hou, mind you, is a Taiwanese filmmaker, and The Assassin a Taiwan-China-Hong Kong co-production). But one thing that seems immensely clear is that is not all the intent of the healthy team of screenwriters, Hou among them, to present a clear-cut historical drama. The film's peculiar way of dancing around clarification while blitzing through enormous swaths of exposition, while lingering on almost completely content-free sequences of life inside the governor's palace, is idiosyncratic compared to just about any standard cinematic vocabulary I can identify.

Nominally, this belongs to the wuxia subgenre of martial arts films - stories of the chivalrous behavior of highly skilled martial artists, spiked with sequences of them demonstrating their mastery (the idea that it involves people flying around on wires is a Westernised corruption of the original intent, as I understand it) - and for want of a better place to slot it, why not there? But this is a most unsatisfying "martial arts film" by the usual metrics. The action is almost never drawn out for more than a handful of seconds, at least a couple of time happening so quickly that the exquisitely minimal score by Lim Giong hardly has a chance to throw in a quick bolt of percussion before Yinniang's foe has been dispatched. Hou sensibly has described this as owing to his belief that a truly great master assassin wouldn't need more than a few seconds to win any match; the effect within the film goes a bit deeper than that, as the quick flashes of movement are very much a violation of the movie's rigid code of still movement with almost imperceptible shifts in the frame slowly adding up to change the image over long takes, just as upsetting to our sense of rhythm as to the victims' physical well-being. The film requires no more than these brief, sudden expressions of action to put the point across; long, extraordinary fight scenes, I imagine, would only be wearying and pacey.

The function of all of this seems to be twofold: one the one hand, it brings a centuries-dead culture to life and then to simply sit waitfully inside of it to see how people move, feel, breathe inside of it. This is the guiding principle of Hou's career, and if it's a wonderful paradox of both dreaminess and crisp realism to see that worked out more-or-less contemporary settings, it's all the more startling and wonderful to see it at play in the highly formulaic world of a costume drama. On the other hand, it stresses with more forceful purpose than any film I can recall in many years the raw otherness of Tang-era China. Drawing from the fine arts more than the dramatic ones, The Assassin does not try to normalise the behaviors and motivations of its characters by situating them in familiar rhythms and situations because at heart, they are not like us; it is the exact inverse of the strategy for a period film that attempts to draw connections between the feelings of the long-ago characters and the right-now audience, breathing life into an extinct culture without anachronism. It's impressive even if it's a bit cryptic and cool.

I think the thing to with The Assassin might be this: watch it, and don't care about anything. Let the sensory experience wash over you: the sumptuous costumes and lavish sets, both designed by Huang Wen-Ying with extroardinary unity of line, color, and shape; the sharp, echoing soundscape of heightened sound effects and guttural punctuation marks; Mark Lee Ping Bing's cinematography, rendering landscapes and interiors in an unexpected, confining 1.37:1 aspect ratio (except for a single shot, one whose purpose totally escapes me; it's the film's one unanswerable flaw) that adds to the feeling of time displacement, while also capturing a focused, narrow range of colors and lighting ranges with impressive precision. Then go back, if and when you like, to start to work out the plot, and attend to the small, scene-by-scene marvels of Shu Qi's exemplary, battened-down performance, all unseen reaction shots and troubled undercurrents. Either way, bask in the film's grand refusal to exaggerate or hurry, letting the moments stretch out and out and simply wait with the characters to see where they end up. It is a reflective, languid film, beautiful and beautifully unworried about pushing itself on the unprepared viewer (you must meet The Assassin; it makes no offer to meet you). Altogether, this one of the great singularities of cinema in the 2010s.

10/10