Critics reviews

The Assassin" is extraordinarily beautiful. The film's editing and narrative construction are, however, no less remarkable. For all its exquisitely furnished interiors and fantastic landscapes, "The Assassin" is far too eccentric to ever seem picturesque. Nor does it unfold like a typical wuxia. Mayhem is abrupt, brief and fragmentary — predicated on suave jump-cuts and largely devoid of special effects.

The Assassin is diffuse to the point of total incomprehension... Upon closer examination, however, the obtuseness of Hou's film reveals a careful synchronization between the protagonist's emotional state and the clarity of the structure.

There is no risk of overstating the alternating manic and woozy pleasure of The Assassin. Like the lavish textiles that help divide the rooms of its Tang Dynasty courts, Hou Hsiao-Hsien's wuxia layers texture upon texture, masterfully obscuring detail to create a one of a kind cinematic experience.

Structured like a classic wuxia film (with nods to King Hu, among others), The Assassin exalts its genre with its deep inquiry into beauty, morality and humanity. Bursts of swordplay; soul-infused landscapes of unimaginable beauty; the silent depths of philosophical inquiry. This is cinema distilled to its absolute essence, an astonishing capstone to a master filmmaker's still developing art.

The film is exquisite, a great sheet of jade-coloured water ruffled by the movement of a sword. There's incredible attention to detail in all the interiors and the landscape shots in remote areas of Hubei and Inner Mongolia. It's a film that gains greatly from second or third viewings.

The Assassin may be light on the visceral thrills of action scenes, but it internalises the spirit of wuxia movies to present the ancient past as a world that we can observe but never fully comprehend. Hou starts the film with scenes in monochrome and Academy ratio, as if to suggest that the entire project is a form of cinematic archaeology, and then shifts to colour and widescreen for his dreamlike panorama of an 'alien' world. The result redefines the very notion of speculative fiction.

In any other hands, it would seem a perversion: a Chinese wuxia film that features action only sparingly, that lingers on stillness, ogles space, maintains incongruity, and disinvites allegiance, while treating physical contact like a toppled vase—swiftly dropping, bafflingly scattering. But this is a work by Hou Hsiao-hsien, reflective of a sensibility sprung from the inside out, with story, aesthetics, and emotion utterly intertwined.

The camera—often patiently static, sometimes subtly panning—tells the story of political negotiations robed in protocol. It tells of Shu Qi's title character and the choices she confronts: to engage in or refrain from violence? When she does act, Hou invests her swordplay with just as much visual and moral weight as her placidity.

What we manage to see in The Assassin is nothing more or less than what we allow ourselves to see in our selves. The Assassin is indeed like a Ming vase, beautiful — and — empty. Those who love this film can see only the vase, and those who dislike this film can see only the emptiness inside it. But without the vase, we cannot manage to see its emptiness, and there is, in fact, no emptiness unless there is a vase that demarcates its boundaries.

The quietest, most nonviolent kung-fu movie ever made. Here, the real martial art is the act of looking, with the frame staying still ever so slowly panning across scenes, creating an extraordinary sense of attention to every detail of space and time.

There's an old line from D.W. Griffith about how what movies have lost is "the wind in the trees." Well, look no further than The Assassin, which not only offers its share of swaying foliage, but also connects philosophically to this idea of cinema as exquisite ephemera. Casting his characters in shadows and shooting through thin scrims and brocaded curtains, Hou Hsiao-Hsien keeps his mise-en-scène mysterious, in contrast to the story, which is fairy-tale simple.

I was disappointed. I did not sense the epic historical tones of a film like City of Sadness. A high standard I know. Yet with The Assassin I felt a strange thinness to the narrative. But maybe the rather inchoate way I'm trying to articulate my response is testament to the film's uniqueness.