Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Et Cetera!

Best known in this country for his more psychologically propelled dramas, Temptress Moon and Farewell, My Concubine, Chen never seems to have made up his mind on whether to concentrate on the sweeping spectacle or on the various and continually unfolding intimate intrigues. He tries to do both, but since his action chops are nowhere near those of his more obvious influences, Akira Kurosawa and Hong Kong’s Tsui Hark, and since he can‘t figure out how to marshal all the historical information into a coherent script, he ends up doing neither very well. Characters whisk in and out of rooms, intrusive informational titles flash across the screen (”The Residence of Former Prime Minister Lu Buwei“), horses gallop, retainers laugh, the queen schemes, a concubine revolts, children are slaughtered, multitudes die. Blood runs like the Yangtze, and you just don’t give a damn. The actors in The Emperor and the Assassin are some of the best in Chinese cinema -- Gong Li plays the king‘s longtime love -- but Chen doesn’t trust any of them to convey the necessary emotions. He‘s constantly cutting into their scenes and pulling us away from the very characters we’re meant to care about. More than anything, Chen seems defeated by the immensity of his task. The Emperor of Qin spent years trying to unify China (the alternative spelling of Qin is Ch‘in, from which the country’s name derives); he started the Great Wall, but is remembered as a barbarian. It‘s unclear if Chen was trying to essay some point about the rapaciousness of modern China; some critics, in fact, see the film as an apology for the PRC. That these nearly three hours of pageantry and carnage afford no clue to either interpretation is, unfortunately, the film’s most conspicuous point.