If one is observing a body of work strictly from the outside, your favorite filmmaker’s sense of timing can be hard to figure. It was eight years between Flight of the Red Balloon and The Assassin, and although Hou Hsiao-hsien told us this wasn’t so much the effect of scrupulous attention to detail as it was the weight of other obligations, there were still eight years of rumors, reports, starts, stops, and, only after all that, an initial premiere. But with the outside work seemingly done and most efforts once again allocated toward that thing he does so very well, there’s already word of a follow-up to his rapturously received wuxia picture — “a movie about a river goddess set in the modern era” that once again partners him with the assassin herself, Shu Qi. [Focus Taiwan]
Or so it was stated while introducing The Assassin at the Royal Belgian Cinemark, where Hou further explained that it’ll concern this goddess’ sadness over the urbanization process that’s destroyed her waterways. Frequent co-writer Chu T’ien-wen expanded the purview: in his words, this film also follows “a waterway enthusiast who encounters a river goddess in the process of his study of Taipei’s waterway system.” A bit to process at first, sure, but easy enough to picture from a conceptual level, through an auteurist lens (given Hou’s long fascination with Taiwanese history), and formally; I more or less instantly imagine it’s in the style of almost every film he’s made. It’s an intensely exciting proposition overall, but let’s not lose our heads just yet — not when the long-awaited return has yet to even hit.