Rustling wind, footsteps crunching on grass, the quiet sounds of domesticity; the soundscape of Cannes Best Director winner Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s The Assassin is almost as rich as its lush visuals. Set in 9th century China, during the Tang Dynasty, and featuring megastar Shu Qi as the titular trained killer, The Assassin comes to Fantastic Fest with about as high of a pedigree as any entry this year.
So amidst all the praise and beauty, both visual and aural, it is a shame that the film manages to be so remarkably hard to follow while simultaneously being glacially paced.
The visual splendor and intentional soundscape is so rich that The Assassin is recommended for anyone who has a passionate interest in Wuxia epics. Performances, costume work, even fight sequences all flow together and form a uniquely cohesive whole. Director Hou’s award winning direction is confident and bold, with lingering shots often capturing moments of day to day life that bring this particular time and place in Chinese history into such a clear picture we almost feel we’re living there with the characters. And yet, so confident is the direction, that perhaps Hou and the other 4 credited screenwriters leave too much for the audience to piece together.
Events of great import to the story are left wholly unexplained, with characters appearing without introduction, important actions of the past unexplained, and political loyalties being almost impossible to decipher. The filmmaking team offers no assistance to the audience, instead asking that we intuit the gravity of various sequences as observers from the shadows, much like our female lead. Not being able to determine the significance of large sequences of the film to the main story is an especially frustrating experience when the pace of the film is meditative at best, plodding at worst.
The Assassin (Shu Qi as Yinniang) is very much our lead character, and we’re introduced to her in black and white as she culminates her training and takes a man’s life. Little is told to us, but much is shown. And such is supposed to be the way to greatness in this visual medium of cinema. But as Yinniang begins to receive assignments from the mysterious Nun who trained her, her willingness to kill becomes clouded as she is sent back to the home she was exiled from years before. Much court intrigue ensues, and both Yinniang’s internal struggle, as well as the political machinations of the story, become challenging to decipher in a film that goes without dialog or spoken word for significant portions of its runtime.
Sweeping, gorgeous, and head-scratchingly inaccessible, The Assassin is a challenging watch that asks much of its audience. It has the power to draw a viewer into its environment in such a way that one feels as if they are there, hearing the wind and smelling the animals. But as an emotional work, it falls flat by requiring so much internal processing simply to understand the proceedings, one’s emotions are left out in the cold.
And I’m Out.
Originally published at old.cinapse.co on September 25, 2015.