Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ‘The Assassin’ gives martial arts an art-house punch

When Hou Hsiao-Hsien set out to make his first wuxia, or martial arts, movie, it was a virtual given that the acclaimed Taiwanese director adored by the festival circuit and art-house cinephiles around the world would create a fight picture unlike any other.

With his preference for long, trance-inducing takes and an indirect storytelling style, Hou undermines the genre’s high-adrenaline imperative to craft an action movie in his own distinct signature.

“The Assassin,” which is currently in limited release, contains fight scenes, to be sure, but the emphasis is squarely on the textural look and feel of a 9th century Tang Dynasty court.

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“Realism is very important to me,” said the director in a recent interview. “I see it as a realist movie that has fighting in it.”

Hou, 68, was making a rare stop in L.A. — his first in nearly three decades. He is currently riding a wave of acclaim for “The Assassin” that began at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where he won the director award. Taiwan has submitted the film as its selection for the Academy Awards’ foreign film category.

“The Assassin” follows a young female killer (Shu Qi, in her third feature with the director), who returns to her home village to eliminate a local official (Chang Chen) to whom she was once betrothed.

Shot on locations in Taiwan, Japan, China and Inner Mongolia, the movie is the biggest of Hou’s career and took 1 1/2 years to shoot, on and off.

Hou said the most difficult sequence to film wasn’t any of the fight scenes but an extended conversation between Chang and a concubine that is intermittently obscured by a wafting, diaphanous silk curtain.

“This took the longest of them all,” he explained through an interpreter. “I shot it, but then I kept coming back to it to adjust the performances. The language they’re speaking is an old form of Mandarin, and it takes practice.” (The silk was imported from India.)

When it came time to shoot the fight scenes — which come in short, sudden bursts and are often over before you realize they’ve begun — Hou avoided imitating the balletic style of Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and King Hu. Instead, he took inspiration from the earthier Japanese samurai movies he loved as a kid going to the cinema.

“I did anything to get in. I begged people to sneak me in, or I would piece together torn tickets,” recalled the director, who grew up in the south of Taiwan.

Later, when he moved to Taipei, he encountered the Hong Kong-style wuxia pictures, but “the Japanese films were more formative for me. They’re more concrete. In China, wuxia is more like a dance.”

The protracted filming schedule gave rise to rumors in some cinematic circles that “The Assassin” was having money problems. Hou dismissed those whispers, saying that financing, which came from multiple countries, wasn’t a problem.

He said shooting dragged on “because we shot in far-away places and often high up in the mountains.”

For one visually arresting scene that comes late in the movie, Hou chose to shoot on the edge of a steep cliff in a wilderness section of central China’s Hubei province. As Shu’s assassin confronts her mentor, a dense fog gradually invades the frame until the characters are barely visible.

“It was very humid that day. It just happened that way,” recalled the director, adding that there are no digital effects in the scene. “I seriously contemplated another take without the clouds, so you could see the rock formations, which are quite striking. But I didn’t.”

The movie was shot on film by Hou’s longtime cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin. There was no discussion of shooting digitally, Lee said.

“There have been a lot of costume dramas on television and in movies of this time and place,” he said via email. The crew “didn’t want to be influenced by what’s been done and wanted to create a distinct look.”

Lee added: “I like paintings, particularly Chinese paintings of nature, so to be able to capture something like this on film means a lot to me.”

“The Assassin” is Hou’s first feature in nearly eight years; his last release was the French-language “Flight of the Red Balloon,” starring Juliette Binoche. In between, he devoted himself to leading film festivals in Taiwan.

“It was something that I took very seriously,” explained the director. He also runs a small chain of art-house cinemas in Taiwan, but he doesn’t consider himself to be a film buff.

“I don’t watch a lot of movies these days,” he said, adding that he recently managed to catch “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Hou was part of Taiwan’s new wave of filmmakers that came to international prominence in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and included Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-Liang.

Their films embraced the daily realities of Taiwanese life, but Hou distinguished himself with his oblique storytelling methods and hypnotic camera work that eschews most Western idioms of cinema — there’s a near absence of close-ups in his films and an avoidance of the shot-reverse-shot vernacular of filming a conversation.

His 1998 film “The Flowers of Shanghai,” an ornately claustrophobic depiction of 19th century brothel life, vaulted him to the top ranks of international auteurs.

But it wasn’t until 2003 that he received commercial distribution in the U.S. with “Millennium Mambo,” his neon-and-techno Ecstasy trip through youth culture.

“The Assassin” takes his penchant for narrative indirection to new heights, especially in the second half when romantic entanglements and political alliances become increasingly difficult to parse. The movie even confounded some of the critics who raved about it at Cannes.

Part of that is his own fault, Hou admitted.

“The script was very complete and detailed, but what happens during editing is that if I don’t like something, I cut it out without regard to continuity,” he explained.

“That’s my problem. I have a way of making a movie like I’m making a music video — it’s abstract.”

He added: “There are clues in the movie, details that you can pick up. But it’s true, you need to see it more than once.”

david.ng@latimes.com