The Emperor And The Assassin

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin, starring Gong Li, the most beautiful woman in movies.

Very pretty, lavish sets, great costumes. Long though, with stylized, slow acting deliveries. But the acting style I thought did a good job of raising the characters above the ordinary into legend, like classical theater.

The king of Qin wants to unify all the kingdoms under one rule. His lover Gong Li concocts a plan to go into exile to get the king of Yan to send an assassin to kill the king of Qin; when this will fail, the king of Qin will have the pretext he needs to conquer yan. None of the other kingdoms will help yan, because yan brought it on themselves with the assassination plot.

But along the way gong li becomes convinced that the king of Qin is really evil; he doesn’t want to be emperor to protect all the people, he just wants power. And the assassin she picks is a humble man who has given up killing. She falls in love with the assassin.

Of course we all know how history ends, so it amounts to, in the end of the movie, a judgment on the king of Qin and whether the end justifies the means, and an historical judgment on his rule.

And the judgment is – thumbs down! Which kind of surprised me.

I remember the Jet Li movie (Hero – was that the name?) in which a series of assassins are sent to kill the king of Qin before he can conquere all the other kingdoms. The assassins all fail, at last Jet Li almost makes it – but he has along the way become convinced that the goal of a unified country is more important than anything else, and that only Qin can do it, so he dies, but he is glad to do so.

This movie is an answer to that one, or that one was an answer to this one. I’m not sure which came first; this was made in 1998 so maybe the Jet Li film came later.

More like a play than a movie in many ways. The emphasis is on the characters and the big scenes they have with one another. There is only a pair of big action sequences, one to open, and one in which a city, the capital of Zhao, commits mass suicide rather than surrender to the hated Qin.

The colors are beautiful, especially the reds – must’ve been in technicolor – and there are masses and masses of people in battle scenes. If it was digital it was a damn good job for that time period.

Of course since I don’t know the history of this period at all, I’m left wondering whether the story is made up for the movie, or is an untrue legend, or is history.

One thing I forgot to mention about the Emperor and the Assassin is that I always think these Huang-Ti movies are really about Mao Ze Dong who unified and founded modern china. So they are criticizing him or defending him. In this movie it’s criticism, and the extended sequence of the destruction of Zhao might stand in for the cultural revolution. His statement, ‘I want to protect all the people,’ in the movie refers to all the subjects of the seven kingdoms, but in maoist context would refer to all the classes; destroying all the Zhao people would mean destroying the bourgeoisie and intellectual class. ‘when I said all the people, I didn’t mean the people of Zhao! They treated me badly when I was a kid, they didn’t give me enough food, they made me herd livestock!’

(written around 10 February 2009)