The Emperor and The Assassin
Director: Chen Kaige
Starring: Gong Li, Xue Jianli, Zhang Fengyi
Ever since their collaboration on Yellow earth (1984), Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have pursued separate career paths, but they have retained a common obsession with the investigation of the past and the ways in which contemporary Chinese culture and political practice are rooted in history. They both came to international prominence with Yellow Earth, but as fellow students at the Beijing Film Academy and scarred survivors of the Cultural Revolution, they shared with other members of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers a desire to express in the medium of cinema their hopes and fears for national regeneration after the tragic excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Of the two, Chen Kaige is the more contemplative, Zhang Yimou the more elemental. Chen is a poet and scholarly intellectual; Zhang Yimou is a visual artist who worked as a still photographer and cinematographer before he became a film director.
In Yellow Earth they together explored the heritage of Maoism: the ways in which the communist leadership exploited folk culture and raised the hopes of the peasantry without improving their lot. After Red Sorghum (1987), in which he unleashed utopian desires for sexual and social liberation, Zhang Yimou went on, in Judou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Shanghai Triad (1995), to portray a more pessimistic view of social possibilities. In all these films, oppressed women seek to fulfil their desires for liberation but are all ultimately crushed by the power of a brutal and self-perpetuating patriarchy. Chen Kaige has focused on the hopes and fears, creativity and oppression of solitary male artists and educators – a progressive rural teacher in King of the Children (1987); an itinerant blind musician in Life on a String (1991); a homosexual opera performer in Farewell to My Concubine (1993).
Now, in The emperor and the Assassin, Chen Kaige has gone back to the foundational myth of Chinese history, to the Yin (whom we used to call Chin) dynasty’s creation of the nation – and to another vision with fatal consequences. The Yin king, Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), has a vision of a great unified and peaceful nation – incorporating the six warring kingdoms within his own. But the nation is founded on brutality and oppression. His lover (Gong Li) is initially seduced by his rhetoric but soon learns of the massacres of her people and the devastation of their territory in the wake of conquest. The devious plot to stage an assassination attempt, so that the Yin king can justify invasion and conquest of his enemies’ territory, leads her to the most efficient professional assassin, Jing Ke (Zhang Fengyi), but he refuses the commission, as he has recently reformed and become a pacifist. His refusal to shed further blood is motivated by an excruciatingly painful memory that will not leave him, and that returns in the film like a primal scene, of the suicide of a beautiful blind girl, whose family he had slaughtered. Gong Li comes to share his horror of bloodshed; and ultimately he undertakes a suicidal mission for her sake.
The romantic triangle, which in the hands of Zhang Yimou would have been invested with strong eroticism, is bereft of sexual charge here. In place of sexual tension, there is a war of values, a conflict of visions. The “assassin”, rejector of bloodshed, who will submit to torture (in one devastating scene, he is tortured by head-butting against a blood-stained wall) and death rather than kill others, is pitted against the king, who exemplifies the belief that the end justifies the means, and whose lofty ambition and lust for power overcome all moral scruples. The stoically defiant assassin is clearly the moral hero, but the historical loser; the king is the historical hero, the founder of the nation of China, but one who is morally blind.
This clash of personalities and world-views is presented in the form of an epic pageant, in which we are kept at a distance from the characters. We are never allowed to become intimate with them, to identify with raw human emotions, to psychologise them nor to indulge in sadism or masochism. The haunting vision of the blind girl who begs to die does not elicit masochistic pleasure: she is strong and beautiful, her arguments convincing on moral and logical grounds. The king’s discovery of the identity of his true father is socially, not psychologically, significant.
The huge expense of the production, the enormous cast of extras, the extravagant historical sets and lavish costumes, and the elaborately choreographed scenes of battles and ancient rituals could remind viewers of the Hollywood epic – the biblical epics and the Babylon sequence in D W Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), in particular – and also Bertolucci’s great Chinese epic, The Last Emperor (1987). But, though Chen Kaige employs similar big budget production values and similarly intersperses grandiose scenes of battle action and public ritual events with more intimate melodrama, he avoids the psychological realism of Hollywood and adopts a loftier moral and socio-political critical stance.
Freda Freiberg