Shu Qi

In The Assassin (2015) Shu Qi says perhaps thirty lines. She wears the same dark tunic from first scene to last, so that in a candlelit room she reads as a gap in it, and Hou Hsiao-hsien is content to leave her at the edge of the frame and let her look. Yinniang is a woman trained out of wanting anything, and the performance is in how long she watches before she decides whether something is still there. It is acting by delay, and it only works with a director prepared to hold the shot.

She did not start there. She left Taiwan for Hong Kong at 17, modelled, and worked in Category III films before Viva Erotica (1996) moved her into the mainstream. Then came Hou: Millennium Mambo (2001), Three Times (2005) and The Assassin, three films across fourteen years, and the three most often named when critics talk about her seriously. Around them she has made commercial pictures across Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland, including three with Feng Xiaogang, and the popular films and the Hou films are usually discussed as if made by two different people.

What works is patience. We spent stretches of The Assassin holding our breath in scenes where nothing was happening, because she made not moving look like a choice being made in front of us; when she did move, briefly and without flourish, it landed harder than the film's few fights. Huang Wen-ying, who designed both the sets and the clothes, deserves a share of it: one dark figure against lit rooms gives the eye a place to rest, and Shu Qi knows how to be rested on. Three Times is singled out for a similar reason, one actor carrying three women in three different eras, though we have not reviewed it and will not pretend to more than that. The cost of the method is obvious. It needs a camera that waits, and not every director she has worked with has been in the business of waiting.

She has now gone behind the camera herself. Girl (2025) is her directorial debut, developed over a decade with Hou's encouragement, and she has said of him, "Mr. Hou is like a father to me. He always asked me to challenge myself." Whether the stillness she learned in front of his camera can be taught to actors standing in front of hers is the question the next one will answer. Until then, start with The Assassin, and watch her before she speaks.