City of Life and Death (2009)

Being a very active film-goer I spend a lot of time slugging my way through a lot of awful movies. Occasionally I catch glimpses of greatness and sometimes even find a really good film. Oftentimes, however, I simply drudge my way through half-formed ideas and pointless plots with mediocre acting. Then, in all too rare moments, I find something that completely changes my views of life and the possibilities of film. "City of Life and Death" is one of those that left me literally breathless as I tried to grasp the enormity of what I had just viewed. It is films like this that make me spend those countless hours in dark rooms hoping for cinema to occur.

This is nothing short of a masterpiece of Chinese film-making about the "Rape" of Nanking--the Nanking Massacre--in 1937, where Japanese soldiers took the capital of China killing roughly 300,000 in the process. There are certain heroes to this film: a Nazi scholar who protects Chinese civilians in refugee camp; his secretary, Mr. Tang, who watches his life collapse as he uses all of his power to protect his family; Miss Jiang, who struggles to protect all of the women of the camp against mandatory rape--"pleasure girls"; Kadokawa, a Japanese CO whose conflict of conscience leads him to make small and almost unnoticed acts of kindness towards the Chinese. Despite these few which the "plot" revolves around this is absolutely about the Chinese people in general in some of the most unbelievably horrific circumstances imaginable.

This film makes no effort to tell the backstory of the politics of the Second Sino-Japanese War but simply throws the audience right into the middle of the fighting. From the opening scene of the siege of the city we are hurtled into a relentless two hours of the horrors of war and the depravity of men. The battle scenes are gruesome and brilliantly shot in ways reminiscent of the opening scene in "Saving Private Ryan," but this shelling is nothing compared to what happens once the city is taken.

There are images of hundreds of unarmed soldiers being driven into the ocean from gunfire, people being buried alive in a mass grave, women being shot in a confessional in the local church. Image after image of the most ruthless violence one could expect--or rather believe--a human being could be capable of. The line between a man having to discard his humanity and an animal becomes blurred as these acts continue.

It is absolutely extraordinary, writer/director Chuan Lu managed to do in the first 45 minutes of the film what many directors try in vain to do within the entirety of their film career: he made me think. He made me reflect on the importance of my life, the love of my fellow man, and made me contemplate the human condition. These are acts too horrific to be committed by a person and yet they were. That mental paradox is dizzying in its implications. Of course this film is not the first to make that statement, but rarely has it been done with such ferocity.

After the initial fighting we are left to watch the occurrences that took place within the refugee camps which are possibly worse. Senseless violence against soldiers in a hospital ward takes place including murders of the nurses, a young child is thrown to her death out of a window, a hundred women are taken forcibly to be used sexually by the Japanese in exchange for food for the camp. These women were literally sexed to death. It was absolutely revolting.

Throughout all of these nearly indescribable acts of heinousness we are provided with something that looks like hope. What the director managed to portray as brilliantly as the acts of depravity were the acts of solidarity and kindness. His treatment of the mass human spirit was almost overwhelmingly beautiful. I challenge anyone to watch the scene in which the 100 Chinese pleasure girls volunteered to sacrifice their bodies for the sake of the children and not tear. The power of those raised hands showed a strength beyond what we may think possible.

Chuan Lu does not take a complete anti-Japanese approach to the film, but it is very nearly impossible to sympathize with any of them. There are moments early on and in the final scene that does make sure to state that times of war are not real, they are hallucinatory moments where right and wrong in the individual sense all but ceases to exist replaced by single mind of the collective. This can be swayed either towards generosity and human sympathy, or it can follow a path to our most natural instincts of sex and violence. Both are examined and both succeed completely.

It has been a long time since I was so moved by a film. This is one of the best Chinese films I have ever seen, it ranks with "Saving Private Ryan," "Platoon," "All Quiet on the Western Front" and others of that caliber as one of the best war films I have seen, and is in general a magnificent example of a fully realized vision for the screen. I cannot praise this film enough as I simply do not have the linguistic powers to do it justice. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this film worth a million.

4/4