Historical drama. Unrated; in Mandarin and Japanese with English subtitles. At the Chez Artiste.
It’s fair to witness all the slaughter, defenestration and rape in “City of Life and Death” and think, “What life?” But by that point, you’ll know that it’s all in the filmmaking.
The movie begins right after Japan sacked Nanking, in December 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and spent six weeks choking it to death. The director, Lu Chuan, shot the film in light, hazy black-and-white, using lots of hand-held camerawork, which lends the requisite immediacy. We’re down in the trenches with the Chinese soldiers. We barge in along with a Chinese man and an American aid worker as a gang of Japanese soldiers sexually assaults a Chinese girl.
The Japanese so thoroughly invade Nanking that it’s the Chinese who appear to be visiting. It’s also fair to wonder, “What city?” The former Chinese capital is a ruin — and not a grand one, either. It’s an immense rubblescape, full of looted buildings and tessellated corpses.
The youthfulness and suspense in Lu’s style leave little room to think. This is the sort of film that sustains the dual illusion of having made itself, while inspiring astonishment at exactly how it was made. Lu does more with the first 50 minutes than some directors accomplish in 10 movies.
One extended, elaborately staged gunbattle commences with the awakening of a sleeping tank and ends with the massacre of rounded-up, penned-in Chinese fighters. In between, there’s time to contemplate whether the movie wants to valorize the Chinese troops (it does) while demonizing the Japanese (not quite).
But not much later, the soldiers creep through a square and find a mass of Chinese peasants anticipating capture. The camera pulls back and reveals a sea of peasants. The mix of confusion, sadness, and awe that comes over the men’s faces feels just right.
The difficulty of enumerating the atrocities doesn’t compare to the shock of witnessing them.
Lu’s movie bears the complex weight of history and captures the general principle of national character. Here, the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled.
Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. You get an alluring sense of the army’s pageantry. You also feel its danger. The men are moving like snakes in the dust.
