Hou Hsiao-hsien
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Filmography
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Drawing inspiration from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s temporally fractured love story Three Times, Jenkins conjures a fluid portrait of a soul in flux, ever-changing yet immutable, like the ocean.
Seven years in the making, it integrates wuxia visual tropes into his own aesthetic while avoiding the lyrical metaphysics of Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or packaging them into splendorous global entertainments like Zhang Yimou’s Hero and House of Flying Daggers.
Other modern wuxia classics like House of Flying Daggers, Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were all veritable black belts in balancing artfulness and epic action.
The sheer depth of its formal artistry places “The Assassin” in a rather more rarefied realm than not only the classic action epics of King Hu and their ilk, but also popular hits like Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), Zhang Yimou’s “Hero” (2002) and “House of Flying Daggers” (2004), and Wong Kar-wai’s “The Grandmaster” (2013), to name the most prominent recent examples of revered Asian auteurs making rare and overdue forays into martial-arts cinema.
Is it an inability to jibe with this new maturity—I have been a son, after all, while I have not been a father—or the old story of the auteurist enthusiast thrown the moment that their favorite varies from an accustomed formula, which I can well remember coloring the receptions of such films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Millennium Mambo (2001), Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), and Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud (2005)?
Like Hou Hsiao-Hsien�s Millennium Mambo, Marie Antoinette creates biography as much through its soundtrack, attitudes and its close-ups as it does through its action and dialogue.