| THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN Director: Chen Kaige "I took a somewhat Shakespearean approach to history in the sense that this film is a characterization, not a historical deconstruction, a similitude as opposed to an exactitude." Chen Kaige At a time when Hollywood studios have unleashed every film they consider worthy of an Oscar it’s hard to forget that foreign films have also been released. The first major foreign film to be released this season is Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and The Assassin. Chen Kaige is one of China’s greatest filmmakers and the only one who is presently making historical films on a large scale. His last two films were Farewell My Concubine the winner of the 1993 Cannes Film Festival an epic that was basically a three-hour history of 20th century China and the underrated expressionistic Temptress Moon made in 1997. Here he goes back over 1500 years ago to tell a tragic tale of betrayal and sacrifice. The Emperor and The Assassin is about the attempted murder of Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian) the first emperor of China who was an ambitiously tyrannical leader who succeeded -- with a great number of bloody battles -- to unite the seven kingdoms of China in the third century BC. Kaige makes it clear that Emperor Zheng -- an accidental hero in China’s history -- had a great number of enemies who wanted him dead including those closest to him. The assassin Jing Ke (Zhang Fegyi) is reminiscent of the retired gunfighter in a classic American Western. He was once a bloodless killer but now has found a conscience and has forsworn killing people. But at the insistence of Gong Li -- a woman he falls in love with -- and pressure by a rival enemy, he abandons his retirement and readies himself for one last murder. Most of the fun of Chen Kaige’s films is his fabulous mastery of the visual art of cinema. The Emperor and The Assassin has plenty of cinematic splendors particularly the imperial palace that was built from the ground up by Kaige and his production unit. It is as visually sumptuous as any of his other films and presents an old fashioned style of film rarely seen since the days of David Lean. One spectacular scene in particular involves the death of the devious Marquis (Zhiwen Wang) -- the emperor’s holy fool – when his coups attempt backfires. Chen shoots much of the scene with a wide angle lens and an elevated camera that shows us the beauty of the enormous palace court and the great number of men who are ready to do battle there. It’s an awesomely brutal scene because the slaughter is shot from a cold impersonal distance rather than the gruesome bloody close-up we would expect. Kaige has always done this type of scene particularly well. He places people at a distance into a landscape like tiny objects to emphasize that they are alone or just another person in the crowd. The film too is less an old fashioned swashbuckler or an "Eastern-western" though than a Shakespearean character study shot on an epic scale with some fine battle scenes. If there is any criticism to the film it is that amid all the pageantry and amazing cinematography the story is a bit anti-climactic. The build up in the film calls for a big battle between the two men and it doesn’t really deliver. The film’s focus is more on the mental anguish the main character goes through to achieve success as well as trust turning into tyranny due to the betrayal of each character toward one another. In other words, all the things that make a great epic. This film doesn’t attain the greatness it hopes to achieve but at the very least it is a great looking Chinese history lesson. - Matt Langdon |