The Assas­sin – first look review

I can’t recall the exact num­ber, but for the first eight or nine shots of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s eight-years-in-the-mak­ing anti-wux­ia The Assas­sin, my arms – from fin­ger­tip all the way to elbow – began to tin­gle with ner­vous excite­ment. With­in sec­onds of the film start­ing, ques­tions dart­ed through my mind: what the hell kind of film is this? How will the indeli­ble imprint of its direc­tor man­i­fest itself?

If things car­ry on like this, should we strap our­selves in for one of the greats of the new mil­len­ni­um? How could the film pos­si­bly keep up this high-inten­si­ty bar­rage of what, to get all super­fi­cial for a moment, are close to per­fect images, sequenced with the kind of atten­tive­ness and indus­try which make most film­mak­ers seem blind to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of what cin­e­ma, what chore­og­ra­phy, what edits can achieve?

The first image is in black-and-white of two don­keys tied to a tree. It’s very much not the image you’d expect a movie like this to open on. It’s also in boxy acad­e­my ratio, which switch­es back to 16:9 through­out the film to denote tem­po­ral shifts in the nar­ra­tive. (A tac­tic used by China’s Jia Zhang-ke in Moun­tains May Depart and Wes Ander­son in The Grand Budapest Hotel).

The final image (in this short ini­tial flur­ry) is when the red cal­lig­ra­phy char­ac­ters of the title appear over a gor­geous land­scape shot where colours are dis­trib­uted per­fect­ly around the frame, the glow­ing greens of the fields, the rich blues of the skies, and the rough browns of the rocks and dirt. It’s not that my plea­sure ceased at that moment – on the con­trary – it’s more that my sens­es were only just start­ing to attune them­selves to the sin­gu­lar rhythms of this immac­u­late work.

Describ­ing The Assas­sin as ​“chal­leng­ing” would infer that the Hou was adopt­ing a boil­er­plate nar­ra­tive tem­plate and pur­pose­ful­ly obfus­cat­ing mat­ters so as to fit his alter­na­tive modus operan­di. But the fact is, this exists out there alone, its only real prece­dent being the director’s pre­vi­ous movies, most obvi­ous­ly 1998’s sump­tu­ous Qing dynasty broth­el tour, Flow­ers of Shang­hai. You might also see it as a remake of 2001’s Mil­len­ni­um Mam­bo, which also stars the great actress Shu Qi play­ing a char­ac­ter try­ing to reforge bonds with a world she left behind.

The allu­sions to genre con­ven­tion are so scarce, it’s like Hou is re-invent­ing the form from its pri­mor­dial con­stituents just to suit his unique­ly lugubri­ous mode. And if you think that the required kineti­cism of a mar­tial arts movie stands entire­ly at odds with a direc­tor who builds movies on a bedrock of long, wide, rov­ing, obser­vant takes and peo­ple scat­tered around the frame, then think again.

The sto­ry, such as it is, con­cerns ten­sions between rival ham­lets in ninth cen­tu­ry Chi­na, and the stealthy move­ments of a lone, black-clad female assas­sin, Nie Yin­ni­ang, who’s been trained to act as a polit­i­cal agent provo­ca­teur. Despite her dogged alle­giance to a nun who kid­napped her as a child, and the swift, uncom­pli­cat­ed style of her hits (usu­al­ly a sin­gle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it swish of a dag­ger), she’s been acti­vat­ed to strike against her estranged broth­er, which caus­es long-dor­mant famil­ial emo­tions to bub­ble to the fore. Just because Hou makes it much eas­i­er to appre­ci­ate the cav­al­cade of visu­al splen­dour he hauls to the screen, the plot is extreme­ly vital when it comes to jus­ti­fy­ing Yinniang’s melan­cholic demeanour, which is what the film is about.

Yet the great­ness of The Assas­sin comes from the feel­ing that, visu­al­ly, every­thing is in its right place, and that Hou is some­how direct­ing the wind, direct­ing the bil­low­ing smoke, direct­ing the flames from can­dles, direct­ing the dance of cur­tains and drapes, direct­ing the leaves shim­mer­ing on the trees, direct­ing the sounds of the for­est, direct­ing the nois­es that faint­ly emanate from rooms behind rooms behind rooms. He doesn’t tell a sto­ry so much as he cre­ates a world, places you inside it and then snatch­es away your roadmap.

One thing he does not direct is blood, because there is bare­ly a drop of it spilled in the film. And that’s not because it’s not there, more due to the fact that it’s just obscured from view. One ear­ly fight scene sees Yin­ni­ang break into her brother’s com­pound and take on her ret­inue of guards. Hou films it in long shot and through a bar­ri­er of trees. You can hear it, but you can bare­ly see it. And then, after a few sec­onds before mat­ters have a chance to progress, he cuts away and moves on. There’s no inter­est in vio­lence, there’s no inter­est in the con­se­quences of vio­lence, there’s only inter­est in vio­lence as a polit­i­cal and roman­tic expe­di­ent. It’s the high point of Cannes 2015.