newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Most Americans know very little about the war between Japan and China that preceded World War II, but that brutal conflict colors the relationship between those Asian powers till today. According to historical accounts, the Japanese occupation of China’s capital city was marked by extraordinary cruelty and barbarity, which led to its being called The Rape of Nanking. Almost 300,000 people were killed, and 20,000 women were raped by the Japanese army, sometimes repeatedly until they died. Japanese nationalists have long denied the vicious behavior of the Imperial Army, and historical revisionists have resisted apologizing not only to Chinese but to Korean women who were conscripted as “comfort women.“

Now, mainland Chinese writer/director/executive producer Lu Chuan has created an epic film, shot in black and white, that dramatizes the story of the 1937 Japanese occupation of Nanking. The film moves among the points of view of various characters — a Japanese soldier, the Chinese aide of a powerful German businessman, an American missionary, a beautiful Chinese woman hiding in the International Safety Zone, and soldiers in the defeated Chinese army. Through this shifting POV, Lu Chuan masterfully shows how the Japanese occupied the city, massacring almost all the soldiers in the opposing army along the banks of the Yangtze, and disregarding the civilian status of the people sheltering in the Safety Zone. Brutality is part of war, but the Japanese generals seemed to feel no conflict applying that platitude to everyone under their control. It’s almost impossible to watch the scene where Chinese women are coerced to join the existing “comfort women,” essentially sexual slaves provided to Japanese soldiers. If they go, their children will get food and coal and have a chance to survive the winter. Very tentatively, the hands go up, until the group of 100 is gathered.

Throughout this long film, Lu Chuan creates unforgettable images — the camera pulls slowly back to reveal a beach covered with dead bodies; a Japanese soldier sees a wheelbarrow heaped with the naked bodies of dead women and recognizes the foot of a woman he had sex with just a few days earlier; an American woman races desperately through the corridors of a building to rescue young girls being attacked. The power and beauty of these images don’t lessen the horror, however. This is a tough movie to watch, but the director is able to present a clearly Chinese view of the events without making a propaganda film. The Japanese are cruel but they aren’t cartoons. They have their own fears and miseries. (Indeed, the film incited controversy in China, where it was a huge hit, for portraying one Japanese character too sympathetically.) The German businessman tries to help the Chinese, but when the Nazi government tells him to leave Nanking, he goes, taking only two people with him. The characters remain human beings capable of everything.