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
