CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (Lu Chuan). Opens Friday (October 21) at the Projection Booth. Rating: NNNN
The original Chinese title of Lu Chuan’s City Of Life And Death – Nanjing! Nanjing! – could be a lament, or a wail. That’s how the film feels, too. It’s not a conventional war movie with heroes and villains it’s about the slow, inexorable crushing of a people by an army.
Lu’s epic recreates the siege of Nanking, six weeks in late 1937 and early 38 when the Japanese army sealed off the city and began a campaign of terror, slaughtering an estimated 300,000 civilians and raping tens of thousands of women.
In the chaos of the film’s first 40 minutes, as the Japanese army takes the city, a few characters come into focus: a Chinese soldier (Liu Ye) defeated by overwhelming numbers a Japanese soldier (Hideo Nakaizumi) who seems like a decent man on the wrong side of history a Chinese bureaucrat (Wei Fan) who thinks his position as a German envoy’s secretary will keep his family safe. They become our reference points as the film heaps one atrocity after another upon them.
Steven Spielberg’s unblinking epic Schindler’s List seems to be Lu’s touchstone he also shoots in black-and-white, with a largely handheld camera. (The non-stop violence of the opening act is clearly influenced by Spielberg’s approach in Saving Private Ryan.)
The difference is that Spielberg ultimately believes in the human spirit. Lu has no such illusions, and by the end of his film neither will you.
