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Chen Kaige's most recent release to reach the United States reminds us that he enjoys a reputation out of proportion to his achievement. The Emperor and the Assassin, ( Jing ke ci qin wang ), a tale of court intrigue and war starring Gong Li, from 1998 and released via Sony Classics, is a long, much too long, historical epic that veers toward melodrama of the most Selznickian kind. Or perhaps it is DeMillian. Kaige's reach is theoretically laudable; but what he is grasping is in reality easily obtained, and has been in fact grasped by filmmakers since the silent era. Which is fine. But let us not pretend that his movies are inherently better because they are foreign.
But then, Kaige is just one of many import filmmakers whose reputation exceeds his ostensible talents, among them Abbas Kiarostami. All too often people esteem movies not for what they are, but for what they aren't. I get the impression that festival-goers gravitate toward the work of, for example, the Iranian filmmakers not because of any actual earthshaking story telling or visual technique on display, but because they are contre Hollywood, which they deem manipulative and phony.
A little more Hollywoody zest and concise storytelling would really come to the aid of The Emperor and the Assassin, and given how melodramatic in a commercial sense the film already is, one imagines that Kaige would welcome just that kind of help. Besides taxing the viewer's patience with its length, the film then foreshadows events broadly, in the most basic manner of silent era melodrama, so that the film's longheurs are compounded by the fact that the spectator also knows exactly what is going to happen next. And Kaige uses music in a way time honored in Hollywood. When a character tells another that he needs to remove hate from his heart the music commences swellingily in the background, cueing our emotions.
For more information about the film festival, visit the website
for the Northwest
Film Center. For an alternative view of this film, visit 24
frames.com
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