Daily Archives: Thursday, February 4, 2016

  • The Assassin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cike Nie Yinniang

    Hou Hsaio-Hsien (2015)

    Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s new film is set in ninth-century China, during the Tang Dynasty.  It’s the tale of a woman, Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), born an aristocrat but trained by Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-Yi), the nun who raised her from the age of ten, in martial arts and, specifically, to kill corrupt government officials.  When Yinniang fails in her lethal duty by showing mercy to an intended victim, Jiaxin punishes her protégée with a particularly challenging assignment.  She’s sent to the notoriously rebellious province of Weibo to kill Lord Tian Ji’an (Chang Chen), its military governor, the cousin to whom Yinniang was once betrothed, before his parents decided on other arrangements for their son’s marriage.  It was interesting to watch The Assassin just three days after Youth.  The visual qualities of Hou’s film, unlike those of Paolo Sorrentino’s, are virtually unmediated by the words that accompany the beautiful images.  This isn’t just because the language spoken in The Assassin is Mandarin not English but also because the dialogue is somewhat formal.  The Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns worked with Hou on the English subtitles.  In his piece for this month’s Sight & Sound, Rayns writes as follows:

    ‘Much of the dialogue has a deliberately antique flavour … We tried to give the subtitles an equivalent patina of age, using old-fashioned locutions and still-comprehensible words that evoke the past.  I asked Hou if this was how people actually spoke in Tang China.  His answer was wry and very concise: “Who knows?”’

    The answer sounds to me reasonably modest more than wry but it hints at another reason why the visuals rule in The Assassin to an extent that they can’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) in Youth.  Hou’s story – based on a ninth-century martial arts story that is a core text of Chinese wuxia literature – is far removed both in historical time and from this viewer’s expectations of what a film drama is, in terms of interaction between and exploration of characters.  Although, according to Tony Rayns, The Assassin is ‘essentially about the ways we struggle to understand antiquity’, I didn’t find it a struggle – except, occasionally, to stay awake.  (And except for not understanding whether a female assassin was unusual within the wuxia tradition to which the story of Yinniang belongs.)  The combination of distancing elements at work allows you to admire the ingenious compositions and the extraordinary palette almost to the exclusion of other aspects of the film.  The effect, especially because of the often snail’s pace movement of the camera, is often hypnotic.  The landscapes and the interiors – the rustling of trees and of gorgeously-coloured costumes – are similarly beguiling, thanks to the quality of light in Mark Lee Ping Bing’s cinematography.

    The pressure of some indoor scenes is increased by these being shot in limited natural light and by the use of a further obscuring agent – smoke from a censer, veiling over a doorway.  The most remarkable example is a conversation between Lord Tian and his concubine, Huji (Hsieh Hsin-Ying), witnessed from the viewpoint of Yinniang, who is secretly watching and listening just outside the room.  A subsequent sequence in which the pregnant Huji is attacked by a smoke demon is extraordinary, both as a technical effect and as an unexpected access of supernaturalism in the story.  Late on in The Assassin, there’s another – an amusing – reminder of Youth.   As if not to be outdone by the scene-stealing Swiss cows in Sorrentino’s film, a family of goats briefly does the same in Hou’s. The primacy of the images was frustrating for me only in respect of the principal actors.  Shu Qi and Chang Chen, both impressive in Hou’s Three Times, were a main reason for my deciding to see this new film.  They’re commanding presences again but it didn’t help that I’d previously seen them interpreting more modern characters.  In The Assassin they often seem to be frozen into beautiful friezes.

    Hou received the Best Director prize at Cannes in 2015 for The Assassin and the film topped the latest annual Sight & Sound critics poll but it hasn’t received universal acclaim.   The very limited use of special effects and the fairly few swordfights have disappointed genre fans (there were fights enough for me).  Some critics have been frustrated by Hou’s concentration on sumptuous pictures at the expensive of thematic depth and narrative clarity.  Leo Robson’s TLS piece on Hou (16 September 2015) goes further.  Robson sees in The Assassin, which he describes as ‘a pointed undermining of the popular wuxia (swordplay) genre’, further evidence of the director’s ‘retreat into a film-centric frame of reference’.  Hou’s own comments to Tony Rayns, although they may raise doubts as to whether his heart was in the film, suggest a rather different and simpler human reason for stinting on the wuxia elements:

    ‘[Hou] had the feeling that it might one day be fun to try his hand at the genre.  The reality proved to be less fun than he expected; he was shocked by the physical demands made on his lead actors by the fight scenes and the wire work and told me he found he didn’t have it in him to make films ‘like that’.’

    1 February 2016

  • Duplicity

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tony Gilroy (2009)

    Anyone who thinks that abstract noun titles belong to the days of silent cinema (Intolerance, Greed) is going to have to think again.  Hot on the heels of Defiance and Doubt comes Duplicity.   Tony Gilroy had a big success with the overrated Michael Clayton.  He’s unlikely to emulate this with Duplicity because the picture’s tone is more light-hearted.  Even so, on the evidence of D T Max’s admiring piece about him in the New Yorker earlier this month, the writer-director Gilroy takes himself very seriously indeed.  His estimation of his own talents seems to be complemented by his low opinion of the abilities of others.  Gilroy has written the screenplay for all three of the Jason Bourne films to date.  He’s proud of The Bourne Identity but didn’t like working with the director Doug Liman, who failed to appreciate that ‘My scripts are very, very difficult to fuck with’.  Liman was replaced as director by Paul Greengrass on The Bourne Supremacy but ‘Gilroy is still angry about it. “It was sort of like a crime against the gods of storytelling,” he says’.  He wrote the screenplay for the third film, The Bourne Ultimatum, on condition ‘that he would not have to speak with Greengrass’.   The latter, by this stage, seems to have been trying to annoy Gilroy for the hell of it.  He passed the draft screenplay on to four other writers (Tom Stoppard, strange as it may seem, among them) for reworking.

    In the piece in the New Yorker, Gilroy explains that effective cinema is all about tautness and economy.  The first of his ‘two fundamental rules’ is ‘Bring it in within two hours’ (a rule that Duplicity breaks, if only by five minutes) and there must be no fat in the writing:  ‘… Gilroy picked up a copy of his script and riffled it:  “It’s all about white space,” he said to me.  “It’s all about not writing” ‘.  Michael Clayton seemed to me overwritten.  It was very convenient, at any rate, that more than one of the main characters was inclined to verbosity (and all of them spoke in pretty much the same voice).    D T Max quotes, as examples of Gilroy’s lapidary gifts, lines from that film, from Duplicity and from Gilroy’s much earlier screenplay for The Devil’s Advocate (an extract which Max – possibly inadvertently but nonetheless revealingly – describes as ‘one of the more famous rants in recent movies’).  All of these quotations are excessively smart – no different, as far as I can tell, from a fragment of dialogue that Max also quotes as having been eventually rejected in the script for Duplicity because it gave off a ‘whiff of effortful wit’.

    In the pre-titles sequence of Duplicity, the two main characters, Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval meet at a party in Dubai.  She’s CIA, he’s MI6.  Claire thinks Ray is very obviously coming on strong to her.  He pretends to be shocked that she should think such a thing.   They go to bed (we’re later led to believe – which, in this film, may well mean misled to believe – that it’s she who, in the event, has seduced and drugged him).  Then Gilroy cuts, during the opening credits, to a bizarre slow-motion brawl on a rainy airport tarmac between two middle-aged suits.  Their respective entourages watch aghast.   (The explanation of the fight isn’t fully revealed until very late in the film.)  These first ten minutes are highly enjoyable, even elating, for two reasons.  One is Gilroy’s state-of-the-art technical assurance – there’s a pleasingly sleek look and movement to the images (the film is shot by Robert Elswit and the editor is Gilroy’s brother John).  The other is a more old-fashioned commodity:  the presence and connection of the two stars – even though Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are stars of a very contemporary kind.    It’s this second ingredient – far more than the direction – that keeps Duplicity going for a while.  The reason Roberts and Owen eventually begin to struggle is because Gilroy’s script is so up itself.

    As in Michael Clayton, the centre of gravity in high-powered espionage has shifted from governments to the corporate world:  Claire and Ray move from their secret service jobs to work for rival pharmaceutical companies.  (Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti – the airport pugilists – play the CEOs of the two companies.)  Gilroy’s structure is intricate but the story doesn’t develop any layers so the way it’s put together isn’t either intellectually or emotionally engaging.  All that seems to build is the director’s self-congratulatory tone, which gets in the way of the film even being easily entertaining.   The New Yorker profile presents Gilroy as a master of the ‘reversal’ and Duplicity might seem to be the perfect realisation of this talent.  It’s peopled by characters who use and lie to each other – and Gilroy, in orchestrating their story, evidently wants to demonstrate too how a director can continually exploit an audience’s trust in him, keep stringing us along and showing us what fools we were for taking what we saw at face value.  But once you get the point, which doesn’t take long, the film becomes increasingly weightless and abstract – and eventually boring.  The globetrotting narrative moves back and forth in time as well as geographically.  The effect is different from that of the Iñárritu films 21 Grams and Babel (where the fractured storyline ultimately seems a way of giving an illusion of complexity to a plot which, if presented lineally, would be less distinctive) but, because Gilroy concentrates so exclusively on the tricks of his trade, the technique doesn’t add either substance to the past events of the story or pressure to what lies ahead.

    As a result, Duplicity seems far too long.  Even though Roberts and Owen are expert sparring partners, they’re hampered by the fact that too many of the scenes in which they’re reunited after some kind of separation are structured in exactly the same way – without the repetition of the sequence of mood changes within these scenes being used for comic effect.   And, although a scene which they play three times – word for word but each time in a different location – is very effective, the two stars are not helped elsewhere by lines that sound smart but don’t mean much – and aren’t believable – when you give them a moment’s thought.  (Claire:  ‘If I said I loved you, would it make any difference?’  Ray: ‘If you said it or if I believed you?’  It would obviously make a difference if he believed her.)   Roberts and Owen have assaulted each other with stylish dialogue before, in Closer.  On that occasion, Owen won hands down – he had the better lines, which he delivered with complete and dazzling confidence.  The writing in Closer is considerably more skilful than in Duplicity but one of the best things about Gilroy’s film is that the two protagonists seem reasonably evenly matched.   Owen gives Ray a chip on his shoulder, which seems to derive from more than the professional humiliation he suffered at Claire’s hands at their first meeting in Dubai.  Ray’s flair for verbal combat has a wary edge – and David Edelstein’s description of his charm as ‘wolfish yet needy’ is spot on.  Julia Roberts gets some friction into her character.  Claire is briskly efficient but the briskness seems designed partly to keep her mind off what she really thinks of her immorality – Roberts’s spectacular face sometimes looks pasty, expressing Claire’s weary cynicism with her work and herself.   For an hour or more, these are very satisfying performances – not just because it’s so agreeable to watch Roberts and Owen together but because they’re both convincing in suggesting people good at their jobs but unhappy in them.  This gives the brief romantic interludes between Claire and Ray a bit of emotional depth as well as a sexual spark.

    Tony Gilroy has some serviceable comic ideas as plot motors but he seems relatively uncomfortable writing more explicitly light-hearted dialogue (like Ray buying pizza at a bowling alley) or eccentric situations – such as one involving a gullible colleague of Claire’s whom Ray seduces, even though this character is well enough played by Carrie Preston.   Others in the cast who make an impression are Kathleen Chalfant, as one of the team of corporate scientists working on the miracle product which the two companies are fighting over, and Denis O’Hare, if only because his ubiquity in supporting roles in prestige American films at present is getting to be uncanny.   There’s a real disappointment in the climax to Duplicity in that (unless I misunderstood – always a possibility) not all concerned are revealed to have been duped.  I don’t want to encourage Tony Gilroy in Coenesque superiority to his characters but, if this final and bathetic surprise is supposed to be a crowning ‘reversal’, it doesn’t work.

    22 March 2009

     

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