Review: Cannes winner 'The Assassin' evokes majesty of martial arts movies

Although Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin is technically a wuxia film - martial arts, swordplay, the whoosh of arrows in flight - it is much more a film of stillness, quiet, beauty.

Set in the waning days of the Tang Dynasty, The Assassin stars a serene and hard-to-read Shu Qi as Nie Yinniang, a woman trained in combat, trained to kill. She returns to her childhood home, to the palace and gardens of Weibo, with a mission she is reluctant to fulfill. There, she finds Tian Ji'an (Chang Chen), the governor, his children, his wife, his concubine. There is a dance - the concubine and her attendants - in which Tian rises from his dais and moves through the women, doing his own elegant ballet.

Winner of the best-director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, The Assassin unfolds in long, soft breaths, Hou's cameras positioned far enough away to capture the comings and goings, the stirring in the trees, the children playing ball at the feet of their parents, the curtains billowing. The landscapes of northeastern China are like a slide show of classical paintings: shrouds of mist descend on craggy mountains; a lake ripples, mirroring the sky; a stand of silver birches reveals the film's star, clad in dark robes, standing like a statue.

The Assassin is not Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and it is certainly not Kill Bill. But Hou - a linchpin of Taiwan's New Wave movement, the director of A City of Sadness and The Puppetmaster - evokes the magic, the majesty, the artistry of the martial-arts movie tradition, and brings a Zen-like sense of observation to the proceedings.

So, observe. And whoosh when the mood strikes.

srea@phillynews.com

215-854-5629

@Steven_Rea

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Directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien. With Shu Qi, Chang Chen and Zhou Yun.

In Mandarin with subtitles.

Distributed by Well Go USA.

Running time: 1 hour, 44 mins.

Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (violence, adult themes).

Playing at: The Colonial. Opens at Ritz Bourse next week. EndText