City of Life and Death | Review

In accordance with its title, Chinese writer-director Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death portrays elemental human dramas and universal themes against a backdrop of horrifying wartime atrocities. Its visual immediacy amplified by often-expressionistic black & white cinematography, this genuinely disturbing, often moving epic depicts the “Rape of Nanking,” the ruthless 1937 siege of the Chinese capital city by the invading Japanese Imperial army. Lu uses multiple storylines from both sides of the conflict — along with an evenly distributed, if grim compassion — to represent events that historically led to the loss of 300,000 Chinese lives. Lu crafts an unusual and effective mix of the kinetic and the poetic, though intermittent stylistic excesses indicate a talent yet to reach its peak maturity. Avoiding sentimentality, but not without sentiment, the film’s non-partisan message is that no matter what side you’re on, the moral lawlessness that inevitably results from war always takes a depthless human toll.

The film cuts back and forth, sometimes with calculated confusion, between the perspectives of both the Japanese occupiers and the Chinese prisoners. On one side we have Kadokawa, a Japanese soldier (played with convincing guilelessness by Hideo Nakaizumi) who finds himself psychologically uprooted in competing ways by the chaos of war: he falls desperately in love with the emotionally remote prostitute he loses his virginity to, while also becoming increasingly unhinged by the appalling brutalities being committed around him. On the other side, we have the likable Mr. Tang (Fan Wei, in a subtle, heart-wrenching performance), a bookish Chinese translator who becomes a de facto liason between the occupiers and the occupied, only to tragically discover that appeals for mercy and reason do not resonate with sociopaths.

On the Japanese side, the young commander Ida is the embodiment of laconic, petulant evil, while his Chinese equivalent Lu leads a rag-tag guerilla resistance squad with a hard-wired courage and simplified sense of purpose reminiscent of the Jeremy Renner character in ‘The Hurt Locker.’

Lu’s style walks a fine line between archetypal and one-dimensional. In most cases he lands on the former side, as with the character of Xiaojiang (Jiang Yiyan), a Chinese prostitute who defiantly refuses to have her hair cut to diminish her sexual appeal, despite the scourge of gang rapes being committed by the Japanese troops. In some instances, however, characters fall prey to oversimplification. Such is the case with the German manufacturer John Rabe (based on a real-life figure), who uses his leverage with the Japanese as a Nazi emissary to organize a “safe zone” refugee camp for the Chinese. What might have been a character fraught with fascinating moral contradiction is rendered instead as a kindly, implausible Santa Claus-type, who registers more as a naïve wish than a human being.

Though his style is heavy with the influence of Spielberg, Leone and Jarmusch, Lu has no interest in clever references or “meta” quotations of style. This director is all about sincerity. As with his previous film, the spare and brilliant semi-Western, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili his iconographic visuals treat faces like landscapes, and elevate landscapes to the expressive level of faces.

He also has a poetic knack for the rhyming gesture, as when the stiff-armed imperial salute of the Japanese soldiers echoes the lonely hands raised above the crowd by the Chinese women who stoically volunteer themselves for terrible fates in servitude to the occupying forces.

Another holdover from ‘Mountain Patrol’ are powerful moments of casual violence. Shocking acts of cruelty happen unpredictably within an otherwise restrained frame, as if they were no different from any other gesture, merely the ordinary impulses natural to war. In one daring set-piece sequence, scenes from multiple massacres blink on and off the screen with rapid, un-rhythmic cross-fades (like Jarmusch on fast-forward), disorienting the viewer and replicating the fragmented spots and flashes of a traumatized memory.

The Nanking massacre is still a controversial event in both China and Japan, with both nations refuting the other’s official history (Japan has yet to officially apologize for the slaughter, or acknowledge the full extant of the death toll). Crashing through the veneers of propaganda, political partisanship, and competing revisionist histories, ‘City of Life and Death’ reminds us that war is never anything more or less than hell on earth.

Rating 3.5 stars