For its sheer beauty, its mesmeric compositional sense and pure balletic poise, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s distinctive and slow-moving wuxia tale The Assassin demands attention. Although at the risk of philistinism, I now confess that for me its sometimes opaque and difficult plot means that my engagement with it can never be as absolute as it’s been for others here at Cannes, who have not hesitated to acclaim The Assassin as a masterpiece and a Palme contender. I’m not sure that I can go that far. The final spark of passion I was looking for was more a delicate firefly which floated entrancingly but elusively ahead.
But there is no doubt that The Assassin – Hou’s first feature for eight years – is a movie of great intelligence and aesthetic refinement; there is majesty and mystery in this film, particularly in the visually remarkable final minutes, when its enigmatic power begins a kind of final ascent. Hou is concerned to do something new with the wuxia genre, to take it to the next level in his own language, and I think he is more successful here than Wong Kar-wai was with his The Grandmaster. He has brought to the wuxia material his own uncompromising seriousness, and welded this seriousness to the form’s mythic resonance.
It is based on the tale of Nie Yinniang or The Assassin, from the era of the Tang dynasty: in 809, a young girl played by Shu Qi is kidnapped and trained to be an assassin. But over a decade later, she is sent away by her master after failing to complete a killing and told to return to her hometown where she has a new target: a military governor who is her cousin and first love, played by Chang Chen, and so must choose between her family, her heart and her assassin’s creed.
The Assassin is beautifully shot by Hou’s regular cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-Bing, and staged with flair. There are scenes of conventional action and martial arts confrontation which seem to have their own particular power, as if the combatants are flashing out from a delicate painting; but otherwise Hou sees the assassin’s life in a more occult or metaphysical sense. The movie is a distillation of the assassin’s life of watchfulness, survival and fear. At other times, it has a dreamlike quality: a floating hallucination. The Assassin baffles, but more often it quietly captivates and astonishes.
