The sorrow and the pity
By Dennis Hartley
One of the lighter moments in City of Life and Death
After watching Chuan Lu’s City of Life and Death, the venerable “war is hell” axiom reads like gross understatement. A historical drama set during the “second” Sino-Japanese War, it focuses on the 1937 “Rape of Nanking” (during which an estimated 200,000-300,000 residents were slaughtered by Japanese soldiers over a six week period). It’s a harrowing film that burrows into your psyche and bivouacs like an occupying army.
Shot cinema verite style (in stark black and white) the film strongly recalls neo-realistic war dramas like de Sica’s Two Women and Rossellini’s Open City. Lu infuses his narrative with a Kurosawa-like sense of humanism, and takes a relatively non-didactic approach that gives us a balanced perspective from both sides of the fence. Initially, we get the invaders-eye view, primarily through the experiences of a Japanese soldier named Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi). As they first enter the ruins of the heavily bombarded city, Kadokawa and the members of his small patrol seem frightened and confused, like they are not quite sure what the next order of business is supposed to be. They meet pockets of resistance from the tattered remnants of the Chinese defensive forces, who have obviously taken heavy casualties and are severely outgunned. It’s not long before most remaining Chinese soldiers have been captured and rounded up. In the first of many horrifying atrocities reenacted in the film, they are marched en masse to the beach, where they are all immediately mowed down (so much for the whole Geneva Convention thing).
But you know what they say-where there’s life, there’s hope. Out of this pile of carnage crawls a survivor, young Xiaodouzi (Bin Liu), a pre-pubescent soldier who looks like a cherub who has stumbled into the pits of Hell quite by accident. His (true) story is an amazing one, and will hold great significance throughout the film. Through a bit of luck, he finds his way into the “safety zone” of the city-which brings us to the conundrum of this tale. If I told you that the most compassionate character in this film is a Nazi, would you believe me? Actually, all I have to do is tell the truth, because John Rabe (portrayed in the film by John Paisley) was a real person. A German businessman, he was one of the key organizers in a group of foreigners who negotiated with the occupying Japanese for the Safety Zone, which ended up saving thousands of Chinese lives (shades of Oskar Schindler). Rabe’s personal assistant, Mr. Tang (Wei Fan), who is bilingual in Japanese, plays a huge part in this endeavor, as does Mrs. Tang (Lan Qin). Tang cultivates an uneasy “friendship” with Kadokawa’s mercurial commanding officer, Ida (Ryu Kohata), a textbook sociopath (Kohata’s chilling portrayal reminded me of Ralph Fiennes’ turn as the camp commandant in Schindler’s List). Through tragic personal loss, Mr. Tang learns that dealing with the devil is a tenuous proposition. Ida’s cold-blooded betrayal is beyond reprehension-and one of the more shocking scenes in a film that is rife with them.
But Ida outdoes even himself when he demands that Rabe surrender 100 female “volunteers” from the Safety Zone to be requisitioned as “comfort women” for the Japanese troops. In an emotionally shattering scene, women slowly begin raising their hands, seeming to reach a mutual grim epiphany as they look around the room at each other and realize that this may be the only way to ensure that their children survive the nightmare (heart-wrenching as that scene is, it pales in comparison to the actual historical record-there were an estimated 20,000 rape victims, from toddler age to grandmothers).
Interestingly, the most compelling character is Kadokawa, who is, almost perversely, the “conscience” of the story (the director has taken flak in his native China for portraying one of the Japanese soldiers in a sympathetic light). Granted-through association alone he is undeniably one of the perpetrators of this evil, yet he is still a human being; he’s conflicted, and at times visibly appalled and repelled by what he is witnessing. He doesn’t refuse orders (until the crucial and impactful denouement) but in a way he becomes an avatar for the collective shame and guilt that we bear as a species that seems perennially bent on inflicting such maddeningly pointless pain and suffering on itself. In an extraordinarily shot sequence toward the end, we follow a contingent of Japanese soldiers performing a traditional victory dance through the city rubble. If you see the film, keep an eye on Kadokawa’s face. He is chanting along with the other soldiers, but as his eyes meet those of the dazed and expressionless Chinese onlookers, it becomes clear that as far as his soul and humanity are concerned, this is a Pyrrhic victory at best.
It’s always difficult to word the recommendation for this type of film; one can’t really say that one “liked” or “enjoyed” such a relentlessly grim and depressing 133 minutes. Then again, you have to figure going in that a film with the word “death” in its title is not likely to be the feel-good hit of the summer. That being said, this is one of the best films I’ve seen this year. It is intense and brutal-not easy to watch, but masterfully mounted and extremely well-acted. I was completely absorbed in its sense of time and place. It also examines a chapter in 20th Century warfare that (save for a stray documentary or two) has been largely overlooked by filmmakers. The fact that the Chinese and Japanese governments remain (76 years on) at loggerheads over their respective “official” accounts of what exactly happened during those horrific six weeks way back in 1937 demonstrates that this is not an obscure incident that should just be relegated to the dustbins of history. In fact…no “incident” of this nature should just be relegated to the dustbins of history.
Pacific theater: Devils on the Doorstep, The Last Emperor, The Burmese Harp, Letters from Iwo Jima, Hell in the Pacific, The Thin Red Line, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, A Town Like Alice, Empire of the Sun.
Previous posts with related themes:
Nuremberg: It’s Lesson for Today
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