THE ASSASSIN

(Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2015)

I love seeing the world through Hou Hsiao Hsien's eyes.
But that means slowing down, paying attention, giving oneself to the images.
His mastershot style is quiet and still and precise, and it magnifies nuance and gesture. Once you become attuned, it gives certain scenes incredible power. I suppose the flip-side to this is that if you do not become attuned, then his films must seem unbearably tedious.
The Assassin is a nuxia - an entry in the "female knight" sub-genre in the Kung Fu genre. It stars Hou muse Shu Qi as Yianning, banished from her home province as a girl to save herself after she reacts badly to some inter-family politics. In the interim she has been trained as a deadly assassin, but she lacks the ruthlessness required of the profession, although her skills are "matchless". Her Mistress dispatches her back to her home province and back to her family, where she is to kill the Ruler of the province (Chang Chen), to whom Yianning was once betrothed. This is both punishment and test, and embroils the assassin in the complex court politics of 7th Century China.
Aside from some text at the start, there is very little exposition explaining this, and what does come is mostly revealed in two quiet conversations, around a half-hour into the film. Hou is insisting that an audience pay attention to this film, that you must strain even to attain the most basic comprehension of the plot. His elliptical storytelling makes that difficult at times, especially where the internecine plotting is involved, but the broad strokes of the story and the characters are quite simple.
Shu Qi's character is still in love with Chang Chen's, and the only question really is how she will deal with the consequences of her actions (or inaction).
When other Chinese auteurs have taken on the wuxia genre, from Wong Kar Wai to Zhang Yimou, each of them bows to the stylistic conventions. Not Hou. Yes he features martial arts fights, but they are as elliptical as everything else here. The editing rhythms may change - quiet a jarring, if exhilarating, new development in his oeuvre - but these never feel like fights for their own sake. Yianning may be a matchless warrior, but she takes no pleasure in her skill, and her moves are efficient and precise, reminiscent more of samurai swiftness and finality than much I've seen in the wuxia genre. Hou shoots her in different ways in each fight; in an unusually tight mid-shot for one, her athleticism obscured (a decision he insists was due to Shu Qi's inadequacies as a martial artist), barely glimpsed in another, her opponents toppling like skittles from her limbs, in an elegant dance-like exchange in a battle with a golden-masked female assassin for yet another. And sometimes he doesn't shoot her at all; he cuts away from one fight to a long shot so that we can barely glimpse it among some distant trees, and stages another off-screen, lingering instead on another two characters. Her performance is quiet and contained but it gathers a great deal of power as the story develops. Chang Chen - always a charismatic presence - is allowed to show more obvious emotion, but his best scene is the one where he quietly confides in his concubine about who Yianning is, what she might mean to him evident in his voice and face.
This is a mesmerising, mysterious film, heavy with repressed emotion, its characters bounded by the social structures represented so beautifully by the period finery all around them, and also by Hou's lovely framing. Only Yianning is really free to choose her fate, and Shu Qi is accordingly the character we follow as she moves through and across the screen throughout the film, alone but at liberty.
All this and I have not mentioned what most reviewers focus on: this is a startlingly beautiful film. It is also an at-times-forbiddingly arty one. But worthwhile.

THE GRANDMASTER

(Wong Kar-Wai, 2012) 

I get the feeling that Wong Kar-Wai could take any story and turn it into a film about Tony Leung mooning around in period Hong Kong, remembering the various women in his life.

That’s not a bad thing; somehow director and star often seem capable of alchemy when they work together. But it doesn’t always make for an entirely satisfying experience.

Take The Grandmaster, for instance. It is Wong Kar-Wai’s first attempt at a martial arts film since Ashes of Time almost 20 years ago. That film is a bizarre, barely coherent clash between a directors sensibility and the demands of a genre. The result is delirious, beautiful and never entirely successful.

The Grandmasters is more accessible. It tells a story, following a handful of “grandmasters” – expert practitioners of different schools of Kung Fu – across a few decades in the early 20^th Century. They include Yip Man (Leung), Gong Er (Zhang Zhiyi) and"the Razor"(Chang Chen). While other biopics have made much of how Ip Man resisted the Japanese, here his life as a warrior and his importance as a symbol and cultural figure is barely explored. The prologue features an extended and stunning battle between him and dozens of men at night in the rain. While this fight scene – visceral, beautiful and brilliantly choreographed – seems inspired by and then surpasses the climax of The Matrix Revolutions, it is entirely lacking in context of dramatic weight. It is unsurprising that this scene was used as a teaser for the film, since it works just as well as a standalone scene. Indeed it is never really explained who, when or why Ip was fighting those men.

Instead in the first act we alternate between learning about the contentment of his domestic life and the political strife in the Kung Fu community, where ageing masters try to settle upon dynamic new leadership while spreading understanding of the different styles across their immense country.

The narrative follows this pattern, elliptically cutting between different lives, times and places. Ultimately it focuses (but only to an extent) upon the relationship between Yip and Gong Er, whose early fight functions as a sort of consummation of a love that is never really acknowledged until it is too late.

There are problems with this approach. In his other work, Wong invests the characters with such intensity and emotional truth that when the romantic longing kicks in – as it always must – it feels earned and powerful. Here it feels a little tacked on, as if he was attempting to give a typical martial arts film some of his own personality with mixed results. You can almost feel him straining hard to find some resonance in this material, and the resulting thematic hollowness is the result. The way the narrative flips – that fight between Yip and Gong functions almost as a passing of the baton – makes it feel like two films stitched uncomfortably together.

But at least they’re two ravishingly beautiful films: the whole thing looks unbelievably good. Phillipe Le Sourd's cinematography is fabulous; and Wong chooses to shoot many of the fights indoors, ensuring that a rich, chocolatey palette predominates, an unusual look for a wuxia.

His cast are superb; Leung as deep and charismatic as ever, Zhiyi carrying much of the emotional weight and doing it easily. Both excel in the terrific martial art sequences, which do achieve some poetry amidst the flurries of lyrical physical action. Indeed, many directors more generally associated with the genre could learn a great deal from how these fight scenes are handled – always visually impressive, they never sacrifice physical coherence of visceral impact.

But this feels like Wong Kar-Wai compromised, trying to be something hes not. It is still lovely and full of good things, but it never feels quite right.