In the movie dull apartment reporters around the world, suitcases filled with dirty clothes in the bedroom sitting on blame. Tote bags filled with garbage loot our hallways, and most of us suddenly cold. Many people use Google search for “symptoms of scurvy” or “how can I tell me if there is gout?” In the light of poor pizza and pink wines two weeks. It can only mean that the glorious / cumbersome amazing / depressed cinephile Wonderland is the Cannes Film Festival has ended a year, all the rest of us to do is to round the promenade of our time, take some vitamin C and put a damn wash on. We will have several trends and themes, we see the emergence of launch later this year for another article, but for now, we will try to remember the whole palaver it should actually be about -The movie.
“The Assassin”
Completing a trinity of internationally-respected Asian filmmakers making wuxia pictures starring actor Chang Chen —first Ang Lee (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), then Wong Kar-Wai (“The Grandmaster“) and now Hou Hsiaou-Hsien— “The Assassin”‘s considered, ancient-feeling beauty really has to be witnessed to be believed. One one level, it’s narratively unsatisfying: the storyline is convoluted and more or less unexplained, and the characters are less creatures to be related to and more elaborate parts of the film’s meticulous design and construction. But on another level, one rarely attained elsewhere, “The Assassin” may be the richest narrative you’ll find in modern cinema —every shot is packed with story and beauty, and every scene is a self-contained miniature of its enveloping, sensual, mythically beautiful, yet immediate and real world. Loosely following a female assassin (Shu Qi) who has been sent to dispatch her old lover, the fights are graceful but few and brief and will in no way satisfy the chop-socky addict. This is a Hou Hsiaou-Hsien take on wuxia, and thus primarily the work of a man fascinated with time and history and a kind of collective memory of China’s distant past as a place of extraordinary beauty, perhaps largely because it is so out of reach. This film moves infinitely slowly, on quiet feet, and like its heroine, it spends most of its time observing and listening, but this is time you need to spend with nearly each and every scene so that the full force of the miracles therein can work on you.