Winner of best director at Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-Hsien returns after an eight year hiatus and effortlessly one-ups his contemporaries in creating the most beautiful film of the year.
Set during the Tang Dynasty, the royal court’s challenging by provincial rulers serves as a context to the inner turmoil of our title character. The Assassin’s silk curtains that billow throughout the movie mirror the underlying emotional currents that simmers beneath the surface of the plot.
Abducted as a child by a nun, assassin Nie Yinniang succumbs to human emotions and finds herself unable to kill. As punishment, she is sent back to her home province of Weibo in order to kill emperor Tian Ji’an.
Opening with a black-and-white prologue, Hou presents Yinniang, played by Shu Qi, as a voyeur who perches on a ledge and hides behind curtains watching lovers and politicians. After failing to kill a corrupt politician, her punishment is to kill her former fiancé, played by Taiwanese poster-boy Chang Chen.
As Yinniang’s inner turmoil heightens, so does her country’s as the court threatens Weibo’s standing as a province. Alliances, betrayals, and politics are all similar themes to Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai.Caught between personal ethics and political alliances, Yinniang forges an individuality that leaves everyone around her in awe. Ping Bin Lee’s cinematography thrills with lush colours and mountain landscapes and water-soaked stones that look as if they were meticulously painted.
For a martial arts film, The Assassin plays at a pace of its own, allowing scenes to enter into the viewers’ consciousness with no rush to move on to the next.
Hou uses violence that often shocks, disrupting the calm. Poor visual effects in the third act unforgivably take away from the film’s naturalism, as does a rushed ending. A horseback ride through a fire-lit tunnel, a silk-laden dance sequence, and a black bird flying against a blue sky—The Assassin is Hou Hsiao-Hsien going for the kill, and I cannot wait to see him do it.
The Assassin begins its theatrical run at the TIFF Lightbox on October 30, 2015.
Nirris Nagendrarajah, Contributor
Featured image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
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