Counterpoint Review- Flowers of War
I recently had the opportunity to see a Chinese DVD copy of the film Flowers of War. It's been out for quite some time overseas, and opened in limited screenings here in the US (30 screens). Both domestic American reviews and box office performance have been unkind to the film, which stars Christian Bale and a mostly unknown cast of talented young Chinese actresses who were recruited from filming locations in China. It tells the story of a group of Chinese women and girls taking sanctuary and protection in a Catholic Church, under the 'care' of a besotted American masquerading as a priest during the Nanking Massacre.
Before I describe my own feelings on the film, I want to address some of the really ignorant critic's reviews that I've seen posted about the film. Some have called the film's events contrived and maudlin. Others have questioned why a White Protagonist was needed for the story at all. And still others have brought into public the very question of whether or not the atrocities portrayed in the film were simply exaggerated and Chinese propaganda caricatures of the Japanese.
To explain a bit about the context and historical material portrayed onscreen, the film itself is an adaptation of the book The 13 Women of Nanjing by Geling Yan. The novel was derived from memoirs and material taken from many Nanking survivors, including the Diary of Minnie Vantrin (from the historical archive files of Nanjing Massacre Memorial) as well as the experiences of the German businessman John Rabe. The veracity of the film's events are of course difficult to absorb as absolute truth, given that it features fictionalized composites of various historical characters, but to assert that the atrocities and pettiness that human beings are capable of during wartime as being contrived and invented to strengthen a weak script ignores the unfortunate truism that real life is far more lurid, twisted, and horrific than fiction ever can be.
While in many Hollywood productions set in the Far East, there is an unfortunate preponderance of inserting white protagonists to create an 'everyman' that Western audiences can identify with, I don't think that in this film that decision was arbitrary or even artistic license. There is a sense of historical accuracy and legitimacy in creating a white witness character based on those real-life survivors and Good Samaritans that tried desperately to save their fellow human beings from terrible pain, suffering, and humiliating deaths. To ignore their contributions and insert a Chinese protagonist in their place would have been the reverse equivalent of historical 'white-washing' in Hollywood. I think the Chinese producers and crew should be lauded for their attempt to give credit where credit is due.
As for the Japanese characters, there is a degree of sympathy for certain officers and NCO's who 'obeyed orders' reluctantly and found themselves in a whirlwind of mayhem beyond their control. But to quote Mou Tun-Fei who was criticized by the Chinese Communist Party in the '90's for bringing into public consciousness the atrocities of the Japanese Unit 731 during a time of reconciliation and rapprochement with the Japanese government, in response to their assertion that "we have a friendship with the Japanese", Mou replied "Friendship is friendship, history is history"; and so what little empathy we the audience can share with these characters is dwarfed by the historical truth of the misdeeds performed by the Imperial Japanese Army and artfully implied in minimalistic scenes in the film. A word of warning, however stoic you might consider yourself to be, the scenes are sure to stir some unease within many at the illustrations of the 'conduct of war'.
When I was a young child, my Ah-Mah and mother used to take me to museums and tell me stories of our kin who were caught up in the Japanese occupation, passing down their experiences to me so that I would 'never forget' what happened. What the film showed was very sanitized compared to the recollections of those who endured the terror in real life. What the film did not show were the instances of babies and infants being rounded up and then tossed into the air like clay pigeons, to be impaled in mid-fall by bayonets; nor did it show the genital mutilation of the women and girls taken by the IJA, swords and bayonets inserted into their sex and sawed upwards, breasts and appendages sliced off for the entertainment and souvenir value of the soldiers; throngs of Chinese civilians and soldiers bound together for mass-beheadings and 'blade-testing' as well as 'plank shootings' intended to kill as many with as few bullets fired. The film doesn't need to show us these terrible things. There are traumatic scenes of aftermath, of implications, the camera turning away or coming into frame without the audience needing to see the final degradations of young girls. Similarly the camera records the final frustrated moments of resignation in the faces of the handful of surviving Chinese soldiers who try desperately to save a group of young convent girls and get them to safety. Both men and women, boys and girls, victims all in the greater scheme of things share that final sense of awful realization when the time comes, knowing they are going to die and die badly. It's wrenching to watch as the helpless audience when these moments are shown on-screen, and restraint of the part of the director lends more to the credibility of the artist, than the raw truth would have. And it's already hard not to hate the Japanese characters as it is, to have shown more would have really caused the film to have fallen into the trap of propaganda and caricaturization, as its critics have already mistakenly asserted.
One of the legitimate criticisms I have heard levied against the film is that its characters are not very sympathetic across the board. I think part of this is cultural, but I can understand the feelings of many Western audience members who find that showing the ignoble side of humanity during war can be depressing and leave one feeling without identification with any of the protagonists. The 'Priest' played (brilliantly) by Christian Bale starts off as selfish, greedy, and lascivious. The Convent girls are petty and stupidly naive. The prostitutes are self-absorbed and vindictive. Yet all undergo evolution and growth during their hardships, and this is staple of the Eastern storytelling tradition, showing unlikable and unsympathetic characters who change and gain heroic characteristics- not because they had them inherently within them, but because there is no one else to be heroic. Western storytelling tradition usually demands identification with the protagonists early on, as they serve as the proxy for the experiences to unfold for the audience, and I think this causes a bit of a disconnect for the cross-cultural window here, not that the two traditions are incompatible, but they do demand some understanding of each other. The casual American viewer might find this difficult for their palate, something that I think the producers might have considered a bit more.
A character I found very likeable and I suspect will be the one most likely that Americans might identify with is Major Li, one of the Chinese Nationalist soldiers surviving from the first third of the film. As a supporting character he exists on the sidelines of the interpersonal stories, but his influence is deeply felt from the brutal opening sequences of the city's fall onward. His is the decision that saves as many of the Convent girls's lives as possible. His sympathy for youth is what causes him to break the prohibition of military personnel from the "Safe Zone" of the Cathedral. And his deeply held convictions that he and his men did not fight in vain is a moving impetus towards the inevitable change in heart for the main protagonists.
In conclusion, I found Flowers of War a very strong and artistically-rendered film, with unflinching portrayals of war and atrocities. I very much was moved by the entire film, and it provoked many different emotional responses ranging from hate, anger, grief, hope, faith, and relief. It is a 'good' film. Not in the sense that it provides easy catharsis for tragedies of humanity, for as Schinndler's List demonstrated, one film cannot wash away the impact of death and malevolence on the large scale of history, but in concentrating on a microcosm of a few individuals it helps make some sense of the terrible events and revelations of humanity that exist in wartime. I found that the historical accuracy and faithfulness to the adapted material to be quite high, well above the bar established by many war movies out of Hollywood or China in the norm. I would urge those curious about the film to see it before it leaves distribution in the theaters or if you can get one of the few import DVD's, to watch it unflinchingly and without pause, for the impact it will have.
Before I describe my own feelings on the film, I want to address some of the really ignorant critic's reviews that I've seen posted about the film. Some have called the film's events contrived and maudlin. Others have questioned why a White Protagonist was needed for the story at all. And still others have brought into public the very question of whether or not the atrocities portrayed in the film were simply exaggerated and Chinese propaganda caricatures of the Japanese.
To explain a bit about the context and historical material portrayed onscreen, the film itself is an adaptation of the book The 13 Women of Nanjing by Geling Yan. The novel was derived from memoirs and material taken from many Nanking survivors, including the Diary of Minnie Vantrin (from the historical archive files of Nanjing Massacre Memorial) as well as the experiences of the German businessman John Rabe. The veracity of the film's events are of course difficult to absorb as absolute truth, given that it features fictionalized composites of various historical characters, but to assert that the atrocities and pettiness that human beings are capable of during wartime as being contrived and invented to strengthen a weak script ignores the unfortunate truism that real life is far more lurid, twisted, and horrific than fiction ever can be.
While in many Hollywood productions set in the Far East, there is an unfortunate preponderance of inserting white protagonists to create an 'everyman' that Western audiences can identify with, I don't think that in this film that decision was arbitrary or even artistic license. There is a sense of historical accuracy and legitimacy in creating a white witness character based on those real-life survivors and Good Samaritans that tried desperately to save their fellow human beings from terrible pain, suffering, and humiliating deaths. To ignore their contributions and insert a Chinese protagonist in their place would have been the reverse equivalent of historical 'white-washing' in Hollywood. I think the Chinese producers and crew should be lauded for their attempt to give credit where credit is due.
As for the Japanese characters, there is a degree of sympathy for certain officers and NCO's who 'obeyed orders' reluctantly and found themselves in a whirlwind of mayhem beyond their control. But to quote Mou Tun-Fei who was criticized by the Chinese Communist Party in the '90's for bringing into public consciousness the atrocities of the Japanese Unit 731 during a time of reconciliation and rapprochement with the Japanese government, in response to their assertion that "we have a friendship with the Japanese", Mou replied "Friendship is friendship, history is history"; and so what little empathy we the audience can share with these characters is dwarfed by the historical truth of the misdeeds performed by the Imperial Japanese Army and artfully implied in minimalistic scenes in the film. A word of warning, however stoic you might consider yourself to be, the scenes are sure to stir some unease within many at the illustrations of the 'conduct of war'.
When I was a young child, my Ah-Mah and mother used to take me to museums and tell me stories of our kin who were caught up in the Japanese occupation, passing down their experiences to me so that I would 'never forget' what happened. What the film showed was very sanitized compared to the recollections of those who endured the terror in real life. What the film did not show were the instances of babies and infants being rounded up and then tossed into the air like clay pigeons, to be impaled in mid-fall by bayonets; nor did it show the genital mutilation of the women and girls taken by the IJA, swords and bayonets inserted into their sex and sawed upwards, breasts and appendages sliced off for the entertainment and souvenir value of the soldiers; throngs of Chinese civilians and soldiers bound together for mass-beheadings and 'blade-testing' as well as 'plank shootings' intended to kill as many with as few bullets fired. The film doesn't need to show us these terrible things. There are traumatic scenes of aftermath, of implications, the camera turning away or coming into frame without the audience needing to see the final degradations of young girls. Similarly the camera records the final frustrated moments of resignation in the faces of the handful of surviving Chinese soldiers who try desperately to save a group of young convent girls and get them to safety. Both men and women, boys and girls, victims all in the greater scheme of things share that final sense of awful realization when the time comes, knowing they are going to die and die badly. It's wrenching to watch as the helpless audience when these moments are shown on-screen, and restraint of the part of the director lends more to the credibility of the artist, than the raw truth would have. And it's already hard not to hate the Japanese characters as it is, to have shown more would have really caused the film to have fallen into the trap of propaganda and caricaturization, as its critics have already mistakenly asserted.
One of the legitimate criticisms I have heard levied against the film is that its characters are not very sympathetic across the board. I think part of this is cultural, but I can understand the feelings of many Western audience members who find that showing the ignoble side of humanity during war can be depressing and leave one feeling without identification with any of the protagonists. The 'Priest' played (brilliantly) by Christian Bale starts off as selfish, greedy, and lascivious. The Convent girls are petty and stupidly naive. The prostitutes are self-absorbed and vindictive. Yet all undergo evolution and growth during their hardships, and this is staple of the Eastern storytelling tradition, showing unlikable and unsympathetic characters who change and gain heroic characteristics- not because they had them inherently within them, but because there is no one else to be heroic. Western storytelling tradition usually demands identification with the protagonists early on, as they serve as the proxy for the experiences to unfold for the audience, and I think this causes a bit of a disconnect for the cross-cultural window here, not that the two traditions are incompatible, but they do demand some understanding of each other. The casual American viewer might find this difficult for their palate, something that I think the producers might have considered a bit more.
A character I found very likeable and I suspect will be the one most likely that Americans might identify with is Major Li, one of the Chinese Nationalist soldiers surviving from the first third of the film. As a supporting character he exists on the sidelines of the interpersonal stories, but his influence is deeply felt from the brutal opening sequences of the city's fall onward. His is the decision that saves as many of the Convent girls's lives as possible. His sympathy for youth is what causes him to break the prohibition of military personnel from the "Safe Zone" of the Cathedral. And his deeply held convictions that he and his men did not fight in vain is a moving impetus towards the inevitable change in heart for the main protagonists.
In conclusion, I found Flowers of War a very strong and artistically-rendered film, with unflinching portrayals of war and atrocities. I very much was moved by the entire film, and it provoked many different emotional responses ranging from hate, anger, grief, hope, faith, and relief. It is a 'good' film. Not in the sense that it provides easy catharsis for tragedies of humanity, for as Schinndler's List demonstrated, one film cannot wash away the impact of death and malevolence on the large scale of history, but in concentrating on a microcosm of a few individuals it helps make some sense of the terrible events and revelations of humanity that exist in wartime. I found that the historical accuracy and faithfulness to the adapted material to be quite high, well above the bar established by many war movies out of Hollywood or China in the norm. I would urge those curious about the film to see it before it leaves distribution in the theaters or if you can get one of the few import DVD's, to watch it unflinchingly and without pause, for the impact it will have.