#110
Post
by zedz » Sun Feb 28, 2016 4:55 pm
I finally received the Taiwanese BluRay of The Assassin and while the blacks are comparatively weak, they seem to be so primarily in low contrast indoor and night time scenes. In outdoor daylit scenes, the blacks were as black as the sidebars on my screen, and in some cases in the low contrast scenes, certain details like the characters' hair were darker than the 'milky' shadows that surrounded them, so I'm not entirely sure that this low contrast look isn't deliberate. The contrast is pumped up on the trailer included on the disc, so those scenes look different, but not necessarily better. At any rate, the transfer was otherwise gorgeous.
There are two extras: the additional scene from the Japanese cut and a 20-or-so-minute making of that’s unsubbed, but has glimpses of shots and scenes that didn’t make it into the film. The Japanese scene is totally expendable but quite fascinating. It’s a scene of the very minor Mirror-Polisher character, set in the outpost to which Yinniang returns at the end of the film, but it crams his entire life into three minutes because, strikingly, he gets the privilege of a widescreen flashback, rather rapidly edited. Including these scenes in the film would certainly complicate the narrative (why is this character getting a flashback?), but in an evocative way, since it would create a mysterious link with Yinniang (which would in turn imply a much greater connection between them than the very tentative relationship we see in the film).
Narrative-wise, everything’s pretty much completely recoverable on an alert second watch (assuming you had an alert first watch). Typically for Hou, he eschews conventional exposition, but all the narrative information you need is there in some form, in some place. You need to be actively speculating about relationships and motivations throughout so that you can recognize significant information when it's thrown away in a later scene. For example, the first flashback scene, which is signalled by a shift to widescreen, is reasonably identifiable as a flashback, since we cut back to Academy Ratio Yinniang musing in her bath, but it's only much later in the film that she positively identifies the woman in the flashback as her mother, Princess Jiacheng, and explains the significance of the story of the bluebird. The second flashback is only really identified as such formally, by another shift to widescreen - so if you weren't paying attention to the aspect ratio earlier in the film, it might not register as a flashback at all. There's a third widescreen flashback, but only in the Japanese version / deleted scene.
Other important plot points, such as Tian Ji'an's wife's past and present political machinations (including the killing of a former advisor to her husband and the failed attempt to do so again) are all laid out before us, but they're laid out as inferences and actions (e.g. the method of killing links the two crimes), without being spelt out in expository dialogue.
You still have to do some work to parse the relationships, but that work brings its own rewards, just like any close reading should. For instance, it’s let slip rather late in the film that Tian Ji’an isn’t Yinnniang’s cousin in an entirely straightforward way: he is the child of one of her father’s concubines, who is adopted by Yinniang’s mother and raised formally as the son and heir (presumably because Princess Jiacheng only produced a daughter: Yinniang). So this tiny scrap of information not only makes the central relationship of the film much more complex - the protagonists were raised as brother and sister and are in fact half-siblings – but it adds psychological shading to Tian Ji’an’s concern for his pregnant concubine, since she’s essentially in the (very vulnerable) position of his own mother. It also links Yinniang's specific concern about the vulnerability of children (which guides her decisive actions more than once) to the legacy of her mother (which is another primary force guiding her actions throughout the film - again, not explicitly stated, but demonstrated over and over again by her actions).