2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang)

THE ASSASSIN (Nie Yinniang)          A-           
Taiwan  China  Hong Kong  France  (107 mi)  2015  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien     Official site [Japan]

Winner of the Best Director at Cannes, shot on 35 mm by longtime cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin, this is undoubtedly one of the most ravishingly beautiful films ever seen, thought of during the screening as a cross between Wong Kar-wai’s ASHES OF TIME REDUX (2008, from 1994 version) and Kurosawa in 3D.  From the outset one can’t help but be impressed by the luxuriousness of the images and the multiple layers of form that exist like wavy tree branches swaying in the breeze, with someone seen stirring in the shadows, moving slowly between the various fields of visions, as rocky crevices seemingly protrude off the screen, where movement is expressed by changes of focus within the frame of the same shot, continually altering the depth perception of the viewer, offering an experience like no other.  While this is Hou Hsiao-hsien’s rendering of a Wuxia film, slow and hypnotically mesmerizing, thoughtfully accentuating the historical period detail in a film drenched in a painterly opulence that supersedes any consideration for action sequences, credit must be given to costumes and production designer Huang Wen-ying that so illustriously recreates the meticulous look of the 9th century, including paintings on the set that were drawn by students from the academy of fine arts in Taipei, while also featuring the captivatingly percussive music by Lim Giong, as there isn’t a single frame that doesn’t appear in synch with the director’s artistic vision.  The problem, as there is for most all martial arts films, is there’s simply not much of a story, and what little there is feels overshadowed by the luminous dreamlike quality of the film.  His first costume drama since the hypnotic allure of Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), and his first feature in 8 years since THE FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (2007), this is an almost equally financed Taiwan-China production (also a first for this director) costing ten times more than any of his previous works, adapted from a 9th century short story from the Tang Dynasty scribe Pei Xing, known as chuanqi, freely reimagined by the director who has had this film in mind for the past 25 years, initially written in very precise, classical Chinese language, simplified in the English subtitles for easier comprehension, yet also pared down again by the director who refuses to reveal too much, eliminating all extraneous material, leaving behind only a minimalist, barebones outline of a story.   

Set in a time when the Imperial Court and the Weibo province (the largest and strongest of the many provinces) co-exist in an uneasy alliance when various military factions are still vying for power and control in China, the film is named after the lead character, Nie Yinniang, Shu Qi from THREE TMES (2005), exiled by her family at the age of ten where she was raised by Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), a princess turned Taoist nun, a near mythological creature that trains her to become a lethal assassin charged with the task of targeting a tyranny of governors that avoid the authority of the Emperor in the Imperial Court.  In the opening prologue, filmed in black and white, condensed into a boxed 1:37 aspect ratio, we see Yinniang (which means Hidden Woman) dressed entirely in black, waiting patiently lurking in the shadows before springing into action, literally flying across the screen, striking a lethal blow, slitting the throat of a man on horseback, all happening in the blink of an eye, seemingly faster than the eye can see.  When it becomes apparent what’s happened, the stunned guards react angrily, but all we see are flashes of swords chasing through the foliage of a dense forest that fades into darkness.   Moving on to the house of her next prey, she is once again a near invisible presence, but decides not to strike her intended victim, preferring not to kill him in front of his young son seen innocently chasing after a butterfly.  This sentiment clearly angers her teacher, believing the art of killing is coldblooded efficiency, with all emotions held in check.  As a test of her resolve, Jiaxin sends her on a mission to murder the governor of Weibo, the place where Yinniang was born.  Upon returning to the familiar grounds of her family home after the passage of who knows how many years, a place she no longer has any connection to, the frame expands to widescreen along with bursts of color, as the opening title greets the audience set against the crimson colors of a stunning landscape shot at sunset.  What follows is a stream of confusion, as Hou introduces a flurry of new characters each with differing motives, including a new palace aflutter with rumors and political turmoil in an expanding interior architectural design featuring stunning ornamental decors, blending the lavish elegance and color of the silk robes illuminated by candlelight with the curtains blowing in the breeze.  Once again, the camera pans around the corners of existing layers that exist within the frame of each composition, where Yinniang lurks in hidden places only the audience sees. 

Chang Chen, previously paired with Shu Qi in THREE TIMES (2005), having evolved from the young 14-year old nonprofessional lead in Edward Yang’s masterwork A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), plays the targeted governor Lord Tian Ji’an, the most powerful leader in the Weibo province, who just happens to be Yinniang’s cousin, where once they were young lovers slated to be married, but we learn his mother betrayed her, so she was sent away instead, and a political marriage was arranged between two powerful families in order to help maintain the peace between Weibo and the Imperial Court.  One of the more poignant aspects of the film is revealed when Lord Tian explains the significance of two matching jade pieces that he and Yinniang were given as children.  All of this adds an element of intrigue surrounding her mission, as she’s ordered to kill a man she once loved.  In the flurry of activity inside the palace, Lord Tian has problems of his own, where the supposed peace appears to be crumbling, angrily banishing a young lord for speaking unwisely, sending soldiers after him to bury him alive, leading to a confrontation with Yinniang in a gorgeously realized ambush in the birch trees, while his wife Lady Tian (Zhou Yun) is growing more increasingly hostile towards his favorite concubine, Huji (Hsieh Hsin-ying), who is concealing her pregnancy.  Making matters worse, Lord Tian is regularly approached by a seemingly dark presence that appears out of the shadows, always arriving unexpectedly, none more amusing than when Yinniang reveals herself to the Lord by falling from the roof and coming face-to-face to announce Huji’s pregnancy, then disappearing just as quickly into the night.  One of the more bizarre scenes features Yinniang having to dual a literal mirror image of herself, another female adversary in a gold mask, which suggests she’s from a wealthy house, in contrast to the black outfit worn by Yinniang.  While this scene is never explained and is more of a puzzle than anything else, with some suggesting she’s fighting her own inner demons, the lady in the gold mask is none other than Lady Tian, apparently unhappy with the way Yinniang has returned to meddle in her husband’s affairs, also showing she’s willing to fight any perceived threat to her own family’s position in Weibo, playing a more complex, Lady Macbeth role (even more devious later), which gives Yinniang reason to pause.  Of interest, the lady in the gold mask and Lady Tian were two different characters in the original script, but were merged into one by the final shooting.    

One of the more sinister characters behind the scenes is a bald wizard with huge eyebrows and an overflowing beard, viewed as a martial arts master with magic powers (perhaps the teacher of Lady Tian), who makes paper dolls carrying demonic spells.  In the one supernatural sequence of the film, the doll produces a poisonous fog that seems to disintegrate the unsuspecting Huji, only to be thwarted by the intervention of Yinniang who discovers the murderous plot.  When the soldiers find the old wizard, they shoot him with a volley of arrows.  In Hou’s original conception, however, the old man magically escapes by disappearing in front of the soldiers, leaving the arrows to find only his clothes that remain without a human body.  But Hou never found a way to make this look convincing, so the old man perished.  Certainly one of the most gorgeous scenes is a rhapsodic ceremonial sequence that is literally drenched in the visual extravagance of Oriental fantasies, which is an astonishing physical reconstruction of 9th century Weibo.  Populating the landscape with remarkably dense forests from Inner Mongolia and China’s Hubei province, the martial arts sequences are themselves conceived as short bursts of energy, viewed as a perfect economy of the spirit, practicing humility, while always maintaining harmonious balance according to the teachings of the I Ching.  According to interviews, Hou has indicated viewers may need to see this film as many as three times in order to fully understand the intricacies involved, first to get a rough idea of the artistic presentation, second to understand the story buried so deeply within the rich textures of the film, and third to fully appreciate just how extraordinary this film is.  It does pose a Shakespearean dilemma posed in Hamlet, but in this film, which audaciously features an assassin as the protagonist, it asks the question:  to kill or not to kill?  Spending most of the movie waiting and ponderously observing, the character could serve as an alter ego or stand-in for the filmmaker himself, as Yinniang is torn between the teachings of her Taoist master to carry out her assignment, while also having to contend with her own family, as her father is an advisor to Lord Tian, to whom she may still have an unspoken connection of her own, becoming something of a prolonged battle of wills.  While it’s extremely unusual for a lead character to only have about nine speaking lines, her opaque, gravely toned down performance matches the severity of her mission, which allows the audience to interpret what she’s experiencing while continuously looming behind the scenes.  While she’s curiously indecisive, playing to the strength of her mental resolve to evaluate in its entirety just how things are playing out in the Weibo palace before she acts, only intervening from time to time, as she allows the natural order of things to unfold while assailing the unpredictable fluctuations of history and time.  When all is said and done, she emerges as the master of her own destiny, much like the director who has made yet another film unlike anyone else, redefining the well-traveled genre as an art form that can literally transport an audience back into another mystical time and place in breathtaking fashion.

Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen)

DUST IN THE WIND (Lian lian feng chen)      A                    

aka:  Love, Love, Wind, Dust

Taiwan  (109 mi)  1986  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien

The final installment of Hou Hsiao-hsien's coming-of-age trilogy featuring three different coming-of-age stories by three prominent Taiwanese screenwriters, where A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) (1984) was inspired by the childhood memories of Chu Tien-wen, A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi) (1985) was inspired by Hou Hsiao-hsien’s own childhood, while DUST IN THE WIND (1986) was written by Wu Nien-jen, who played the father NJ in Edward Yang’s YI YI (2000).  In keeping with the tone of authenticity, each of the three films was shot in the actual childhood home of each writer.  The setting of this film takes place in the picturesque mountain village of Jiufen in the northeast part of Taiwan, which was used again in A City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), Hou’s first entry into his historical trilogy, where the shot from the mountain to the hillside inlets and cliffs jutting out into the bay below offers a spectacular panoramic vista (third photo shown here:  Two kinds of Hou Hsiao hsien | Notes on The Cultured Life), perhaps the most identifiable, signature shot of Taiwan throughout the director’s career.  This early coming-of-age trilogy is also significant for the director’s initial use of non-professional actors, a key component in establishing a natural style of realism that reflects an unembellished world stripped of all artifice, using extensive improvisation to arrive at the final shape of his scenes, where his film aesthetic is reflected in sparse dialogue with long stretches of silence, long takes and minimal camera movement, where the story advances by the reading of letters, the telling of stories, a change in hairstyle, or barely perceptible shifts in the inner lives of characters.  Unlike films of the West, Hou’s films offer no unnecessary explanation, where the use of close-ups and point-of-view shots are nonexistent, while the key to understanding the poetry of his films is recognizing the rhythm and sequence of his shots, which are often expressed with great visual grace and beauty, most notably through a lifelong collaboration with cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin which began in A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi), developing a familiarity with the lives shown onscreen, offering insights that can only be obtained through the perception and imagination of an ever vigilant viewer, where Hou’s films are increasingly challenging and unorthodox.      

This is a small film which paints a beautiful portrait of impermanence, evoking poetic moods and shifting tides that affect the fate of our lives.  The film is set in 1965 in the small mining town of Jiufen, featuring a gorgeous opening shot sequence of rapidly approaching train tracks seen through the windows of a train as it passes through the darkness of tunnels, exposing the foliage of lush verdant mountainsides.  This is the first of a series of films to star Li Tien-lu from The Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993) as the aging and eccentric Grandpa, who for the most part improvises his own dialogue, telling original stories that are woven into the fabric of the film, not in narrative but in tone, offering a unique flavor in a cast of non-professionals, including his son’s family and his grandchildren, which includes his teenage grandson Wan (Wang Chien-wen), the stand-in for the writer.  One of the smalltown joys is watching outdoor movies on a giant tarp, like a ship’s sail, where the community collectively meets, yet inevitably the power would go out during the movie.  Hou establishes a rhythm of life reflected in these earlier times, with children playing on the street, neighbors helping one another, where they knew everyone, all captured with extreme calmness, as the 60’s was an era when people left the rural villages to seek work in Taipei, where they knew no one.  Instead of going to high school, Wan joins his girlfriend Huen (Shufang Chen), the hometown girl next door, in Taipei, disinterestedly working odd jobs, living in a loft above an old movie theater with several artists, where one can’t help but think of Tsai Ming-liang's GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003).  Hou’s customary cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin shoots the first of his memorable table sequences, most notably the opening shot in Flowers of Shanghai (Hai shang hua) (1998), capturing the vibrant energy of social settings that are featured in nearly every film, including one here where a group of friends meet to celebrate the sendoff of a friend joining the army for three years, drinking beer and singing songs over a festive meal, where Huen hesitatingly takes her first drink, then another, causing Wan shame and internal distress, which is shown by his increasingly anxious mood smoking cigarettes.  The passing of time is established by his repetitive visits to Huen where she works as a seamstress, saving money by living on the premises, where she grows distraught when he doesn’t visit regularly, or hear the latest news from her family, as she routinely sends money home.  

Ultimately, this is a heartbreaking story of lost love, quite reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Paraplegias de Cherbourg) (1964), where the essential characteristic expressed throughout is a youthful sincerity.  Using trains traveling through a countryside, motorbikes through the streets of the city, or a young man drifting aimlessly through meaningless jobs, the film contrasts the harshness of the country with the equally bleak city life, examining the problems of surviving without an education in an unsympathetic environment.  Without an actual plot or storyline, the director uses a series of vignettes connected by utterly sublime guitar music by Ming Jang-chen where over a ten year time period, people continue to look the same but something in their lives has changed, where doors that open ever so briefly are also quickly closed by a turn of events.  While Huen’s hauntingly quiet beauty represents a purity and innocence of youth, Wan is a very unrefined young man with suppressed emotions, a very closed personality, unlike his grandfather who is often seen sitting outside smoking, where he talks to all the neighbors and doesn’t miss a thing.  The couple is always shown together in the first half of the film, where there are no hugs or kisses, only an established intimacy, but when Wan is drafted into the army, the separation has untold consequences, as Huen begins seeing the postman, eventually getting married, causing a shock to the local families, leaving Wan stupefied from afar, showing how one leaves the carefree moments of youth with a great deal of reluctance, a theme that returns again in MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001).  Much like Japanese director Ozu, Hou uses transitional shots of telephone lines, railway switches, balconies overlooking the street, train shots through the mountainsides, wash hanging on the lines in alleyways, or street scenes with the inevitable stacks of food lined up, often shown glowing in the dark.  Actually the entire film is composed of transitional shots, like reflections of childhood memories, expressed in the continual railway travels back and forth in their youth or the suspension bridge of Jiufen, where a train passes in the background leaving behind a trail of smoke.  The village is literally set on a mountainside, where one must climb a steep set of stairs just to get there, young and old alike.  Using brief images of landscapes or a quiet, recurring musical guitar theme, the film evokes great sympathy for its characters, using a slow, unhurried style of long takes that captures the hardships and humor of everyday life.  But it’s a frail balance holding it all together, so when a single thread breaks loose, one can easily lose hold of one’s bearings. 

A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Tong nien wang shi)

A TIME TO LIVE AND A TIME TO DIE (Tong nien wang shi)          A          
Taiwan  (138 mi)  1985  d:  Hou Hsiao-hsien      co-directors:  Lao Jia-hua, Yang Lai-yin, Xu Xiao-ming

Hou’s autobiographical film bears a strong similarity to Edward Yang’s later masterwork A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), almost as if it is a trial run of the same film, though seen from a different perspective.  Both directors were born in the exact same year (1947) in China with families that emigrated shortly afterwards to Taiwan, where in each film the Japanese style homes of the protagonists reflect the remnants of half a century of Japanese colonization, including the presence of samurai swords left behind, where so much was expected of the first generation of offspring, but the uncertainties of the parents, whose lives were uprooted, are passed onto their children, thinking initially the move to Taiwan would be short term before returning to the mainland.  Set against the backdrop of the island’s turbulent and often bloody history, the significance of education is similarly ignored by bored and disinterested kids, where even the depiction of gang fights is similar, using a static camera to capture a long shot of a street scene, where people move in and out of the picture, where the only depicted violence evolves out of a quick rush of gang members followed by threatening offscreen sounds of yelling and screaming.  These moments of instantaneous chaos erupt out of complete stillness.  The second installment of a coming-of-age trilogy featuring three different Taiwanese screenwriters, coming after A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) (1984, inspired by the childhood memories of Chu Tien-wen), and before Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) (1986, inspired by Wu Nien-jen), the film chronicles the family’s attempt to acclimate to life in postwar Taiwan in the aftermath of the Chinese revolution when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops along with nearly 2 million Chinese were driven by the Communists off the mainland into exile on the tiny island of Taiwan, where the film can be seen as a longterm search to recapture their own identity.  Only the second of Hou’s films to reach the West (following the first segment of the trilogy), the film won the International Critic’s Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986.

More than any other Hou Hsiao-hsien film, this quiet and contemplative film also bears a strong aesthetic resemblance to Ozu, particularly themes of transience and mortality, where the interior shots are framed by a fixed, ground level camera inside a home featuring Japanese architecture, where conventional narrative is abandoned and emphasis is placed on establishing a rhythm through the framing and pacing of observational shots, where the passing of time is reflected through the slowly evolving lives and experiences of a single family, where death plays a prominent part.  Narrated by the director offering “some memories from my youth,” the film covers three generations, a kindly grandmother (Tang Yu-Yuen), the parents, and children, including young Ah-ha (You Ashun), a stand-in for the director, where each develops a unique relationship between the present and the past.  The grandmother continues to believe she’s still on the mainland and keeps looking for a Mekong Bridge that isn’t there, but that doesn’t stop her from searching for it, while the parents, the dutiful mother (Mei Feng) and sickly, asthmatic father (Tien Feng), believe their stay is temporary in Taiwan and that soon life will return to the way it was in the past, while the children are oblivious to any connection to the past and lead rootless lives.  Unfolding in long, lingering shots by Mark Lee Ping Bin, the first in what has become a lifelong collaboration with this director, the film is given a flowing, naturalistic style where a collection of detail accumulates power over time, as the audience grows more invested with the family.  Mostly seen through the eyes of Ah-ha, where due to his father’s asthma, the family has to move from the urban city of Hsinchu further south to the backwater town of Fengshan, where a conflict between urban and rural values is a recurring theme in many of Hou’s films.  Adding authenticity to the story, the film is actually shot in the house where the director grew up as a youth, as do the other stories in the trilogy, as A Summer at Grandpa's (Dong Dong De Jia Qi) was actually shot at screenwriter Chu Tien-Wen's grandparents’ home in the countryside, and Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen) in Wu Nien-Jen's home town.

The film is a flow of recurring memories, seeing his father sit at his desk, or his mother and elder sister working in the kitchen, while he and his brothers play around the house or outside on the street, or we’ll see the entire family sitting around chewing sugarcane while a parent reads a letter received from a relative back home, as the audience is regularly invited into the family home through the director’s perspective.  While the parents are stricken with emotion, realizing the fading connection to their pasts, the kids are more interested in adding the envelope’s stamp to their growing collection, seen peeling the stamp off the paper in steaming hot water, then placing the stamps on a windowpane to dry.  Early on there are images of soldiers arriving in town on horseback, or one can hear the sound of tanks rumbling through the village in the middle of the night.  While these military references are clear, including belligerent radio reports of various military activities, there is no follow up discussion about it by the family, as they all but ignore it.  In contrast, there are also random power outages where families in the darkness must rely upon candlelight, or a recurring image of sounds of the rain pattering against the windowpanes with Ah-ha looking out, often associated with illness or loss, sounds and images of loneliness and isolation.  One of the more poignant scenes comes the night before elder sister’s wedding, where her mother reminisces about the past with her daughter, describing how she lost the second daughter under dire circumstances, a quiet moment where the daughter sits in silence and only the rain outside can be heard, a poetic use of silence and emptiness, where the sound of the rain emphasizes the spreading atmosphere of sorrow, all told in a single shot where the camera never moves, where in only a few sentences we sense how the experiences of a lifetime are being distilled and transmitted to the next generation.  In a single shot, the time jumps ahead ten years with no other accompanying explanation, but a new set of actors play the children.  The shifts in daily routine are accurately recorded, where the balance of childhood is beautifully contrasted against a devastating portrait of growing old.  The death sequences have a jolting power, not that they’re unexpected, but the haunting impact they have on the family can be overwhelming.  Of interest, Hou uses recurrent theme music from Wu Chu-chu that adds a lyric grace note to this exquisite Proustian meditation that may as well be called In Search of Lost Time.