Two donkeys. That’s the opening shot. You’ve never seen such artistically rendered cinematic donkeys. Shot in black and white, the framing, the geometry, the rhythm of swaying branches, morphing abstract shapes suddenly recognizable; the image absolutely sings.
Then we have a slow segue to two female figures, standing in the forest shadows, alongside their furry transportation. Taoist martial artists. Assassins. A master (a nun) and her student; like two exotic lynxes, stalking prey. Stunning.
Then the screen comes to life with color, and one feels instantaneously smacked in the face from all this cinematic artistry, the degree of which is rarely seen in film these days.
Which, upon first review, felt like a genuine aesthetic nugget of gold. After discovering that the majority of the film’s financial backing came compliments of the Chinese government, the situation needed to be re-framed. Every country is guilty of cultural enhancement and whitewashing, and America is particularly good at cloaking blatant military recruitment ads as movie blockbusters, such as “T0p Gun.”
Anti-‘Kill Bill’
In 2015, Taiwanese master filmmaker Hsiao-Hsien Hou made a wuxia film. What’s wuxia? Bruce Lee is wuxia. Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” too, but “Kill Bill” is entertainment and “The Assassin” is art, which is why it was selected by Taiwan as the official entry to the 2016 Academy Awards.Seventh Century China
It came to pass that a child of royalty, a general’s daughter, Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), had been abducted at age 10. She was then raised and instructed by the above-mentioned princess-turned-Taoist-nun Fang-yi Sheu to be a legendary fighter.
By the time Nie Yinniang had mastered her art, the Tang emperor’s outlying garrisons had become rebellious. One source of rebellion, Tian Ji'an (Chang Chen), the military governor of the province of Weibo, became a man marked for death.
As a penance for refusing to kill a man because his young son was present, as well as to divest the not-quite-a-master assassin Nie of her remaining human feelings, her nun master sends her to kill this governor Tian Ji‘an. The problem is, he’s Nie Yinniang’s cousin. And she’d been betrothed to marry him.
The Beauty
Actress Shu Qi is highly charismatic; she makes the conflict between her lingering vulnerability to human emotion and the demands of the merciless, un-swayable emotional state of her profession tangible.
“Assassin” has military planning, politics, power plays, and personalities, and is thus complex on one level, but the complexity is balanced by the sparseness, and the meditative pace is not boring but rejuvenating in its attention to detail. The soundtrack consists largely of birdsong and drumbeat. And the wind.
More impressions: wooden pagodas, rock gardens, moss-roofed abodes that blend with the landscape, glowing candles, an ancient story of a bluebird that refused to sing until placed before a mirror, as bluebirds only sing to their own kind.
An otherworldly tableau of a woman in silk strumming a zither, sounding curiously musically current. A fight in a white-birch-tree forest between two female warriors—primal, like wild birds of prey. It ends only when Nie splits the golden face-mask of her opponent with one dagger swipe that bespeaks a supernormal level of accuracy, leaving her opponent unscathed.
The Ultimate Fight
The challenge of relinquishing human love is daunting. The dedication to completely transcending all human emotion and moving toward a divine state is the basis of all serious spiritual paths, but rarely does such a daunting test such as Nie’s choice of deciding whether the man she once loved, lives or dies, come about. It’s an extreme enough example that it could almost be considered the pinnacle and archetype of the sacrifice of emotion. It remains to be seen if Nie is ready yet.
Overall, while the pace moves like slow waters running deep, the visuals are arresting, even if you’re not crazy for that sort of thing. But the art-house crowd will be over the moon.
Ultimately though, other than Mulan, female warriors and assassins weren’t actually a thing in traditional China. In the time that this film is set, China was at the height of it’s cultural refinement, beauty, tradition, order, high moral elevation, and spirituality. The extremes of Yin and Yang were healthy and had their own cultures and traditions. Males were hard men; powerful warriors of great courage who'd lay down their lives for their women and children in a heartbeat. Female was synonymous with qualities of softness, nurturing, yielding, quiet, and harmonious. The two extremes balanced exquisitely, and there was no such thing as a divorce rate. It didn’t exist. It wasn’t needed.
