“At the core of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema is a deep investment in the rift formed between an independent Taiwan and a possessive mainland China. Tender stories of unrequited romance (Three Times, Flowers of Shanghai) become bracingly political, and coming-of-age stories (The Boys from Feng Kuei, Millennium Mambo) gain added pathos in their exploration of uncertain national identities. Crucially, these subtexts never overwhelm Hou’s characters, many of whom have been informed by the director’s own youth spent in a rapidly changing Taiwan. In recent years, the same has been tue of the less explicitly autobiographical Hou surrogates played by actress Shu Qi, whose screen presence — gorgeous and haunted, graceful even when stone still — represents the perfect analogue for his painterly, meditative formalism.
“In The Assassin, Shu plays Nie Yinniang, a young woman cast out of her home and trained in the art of the kill in the waning years of the Tang dynasty. Her latest mark—per a chilly handler frustrated with the moral conscience that compromised her last job—is a man to whom Yinniang was once betrothed, her cousin Lord Tian Ji’an (Shu’s Three Times co-star Chang Chen). Yinniang’s reticence toward her role as contracted killer becomes a mirror gesture of Hou’s tentative adoption of the action tropes. But like his brutally efficient heroine, when action is deemed necessary, it’s executed with a high caliber: sharp, practical, fleeting bursts of movement that disturb the film’s serene compositions like ripples across a pond.
“This makes for a quantitatively different filmmaking form for Hou, but no greater departure than that of his last feature, the French-language Flight of the Red Balloon. While that film’s simple narrative — a harried single-mom balancing her passion for art with the obligations of raising an adolescent child — framed the study of a foreign culture’s representational cinema, The Assassin returns Hou to his own. Filtering in not only the wuxiagu zhuang dramas, Hou mounts a timeless critique of puppet governance, warring states, and the resulting human casualty.
“Shot in the contrast-heavy black-and-white chosen for the film’s economical prologue, The Assassin’s opening composition hints at the film’s themes. A camera slowly pans away from two donkeys tied to a tree, revealing their masters , Yinniang and her teacher , both staring in the opposite direction of the animals. The image calls attention to the subservient first, and the ambivalence of the powerful second, a historical consideration that transcends period trappings—much like the etymological significance of the two jade amulets Yinniang and Tian Ji’an constantly brood over. Elsewhere, Hou and cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin use the canvas of The Assassin’s colorful mis-en-scene and attentive sound design to externalize the philosophies of its characters: the low rumble of percussion that fills the Imperial court’s austere crimson and gold halls, the billowing fog and jutting landscapes that frame Yinniang’s duplicitous teacher, and most importantly, the tranquil stillness and soft-focus lensing of Weibo’s rural villages, striving to exist outside of provincial conflicts.” ~ Sam C. Mac
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