The Flowers of War 金陵十三釵

Story

Nanjing, central China, 13 Dec 1937. After 20 days of continuous bombing the city has fallen to the Japanese army. Among those running for their lives through the foggy streets is a group of convent girls, including Meng Shujuan (Zhang Xinyi), seeking refuge in the Red Cross-protected Winchester Cathedral, run by the late Father Ingleman. En route they meet John Miller (Christian Bale), an American mortician-cum-adventurer, who is also making for the cathedral to prepare Ingleman's body for burial. The only surviving group of Chinese soldiers, led by Major Li (Tong Dawei), gives cover to the girls but is almost entirely wiped out in the fierce fighting. Sixteen of the girls, plus Miller, make it to the cathedral, where they are let in by young adopted orphan George Chen (Huang Tianyuan), who tells Miller that Ingleman's body has been destroyed by a bomb. Miller, interested only in money and drink, ransacks the church but finds only the latter. Meanwhile, 14 courtesans (known as The Women of the Qinhuai River) from the city's most famous brothel force their way into the cathedral, also seeking refuge. Their leader, Zhang Yumo (Ni Ni), who speaks English, flirts with the willing Miller, hoping that, as a protected Westerner, he can help them get out of the city. Subsequently, Major Li arrives, with the body of a seriously wounded boy, Pu Sheng (Zhu Liangqi), and then leaves, so as not to endanger the civilian refugees. As the whores and convent girls start quarrelling, Japanese troops led by Lieutenant Asakura (Yamanaka Takashi) break in and try to rape the women. Miller, who dressed up as a priest in a drunken stupour, tries to defend them, and Major Li creates a diversion from outside, but two of the convent girls die. Peace is restored when two Japanese platoons arrive led by the respectful Colonel Hasegawa (Watabe Atsuro), to whom Miller maintains his disguise of being a priest. Miller enlists the help of Meng (Cao Kefan), Shujuan's father who is working as a translator for the Japanese, to secretly repair a lorry in the cathedral's grounds. And as events change, Miller and all the women in the cathedral embark on an elaborate escape plan.

Review

The bloom goes off the career of ZHANG Yimou 張藝謀 in The Flowers of War 金陵十三釵. Already the subject of numerous TV dramas and films — including, most recently, the extraordinary Mainland movie City of Life and Death 南京！南京！ (2008) and the more conventional German production John Rabe (2008) — the horrific 1937-38 Rape of Nanjing is still a running sore in Chinese-Japanese relations, with the former claiming 300,000 civilian deaths and the latter admitting half that number. With its bold structure, and half-impressionistic, half-gruesome approach, LU Chuan 陸川's B&W movie broke the melodramatic mould while still delivering an immensely powerful emotional experience.

Though it's almost impossible to compare the two very different movies, Flowers comes as a major disappointment — surprisingly, given Zhang's talent for fresh approaches to historical material. Kitted out with a Hollywood star (British-born Christian BALE, back in a China story after his teenage role in the Shanghai-set Empire of the Sun), laden with a mixture of Chinese and awkward English dialogue, and saddled with a script that's over-burdened with thinly-drawn characters, the film eventually devolves into a formulaic drama of a westerner saving his own self-respect along with some locals' lives.

The problem is not so much the beefy Bale's miscasting (which brings too many distracting associations to the table) or his inadequate performance (which skips from over-acting through flippancy to transparent sincerity) but the screenplay by LIU Heng 劉恆, a noted realist writer with whom Zhang worked on Ju Dou 菊豆 (1990) and The Story of Qiu Ju 秋菊打官司 (1992), and YAN Geling 嚴歌苓, author of the original novella. Yan's writings have provided the basis for several interesting movies (Siao Yu 少女小漁 (1994), Xiu-Xiu: The Sent Down Girl 天浴 (1998)) but, like Liu (The Knot 雲水謠 (2006), Iron Men 鐵人 (2009)), she's been less successful as an original scriptwriter (Forever Enthralled 梅蘭芳 (2008)). Yan's original 2007 book, republished in 2011 in a longer version, didn't even feature Bale's character of an American mortician-cum-adventurer who's caught up in the drama by accident and is reformed from an opportunist into a local hero.

Western characters working out their private obsessions are a familiar component of Hollywood-goes-Asia movies, from The Inn of the Sixth Happiness to Three Seasons. The biggest irony of The Flowers of War is that Zhang, a self-proclaimed champion of Chinese film-making values and with the biggest budget ever for a Mainland film (reportedly RMB600 million/US$95 million), has effectively made the most Hollywood of Hollywood movies, with stock characters, nasty Japanese, an American can-do hero and largely anonymous locals.

This wouldn't matter in the slightest if Flowers worked; but on both a dramatic and an emotional level it's rarely more than superficial and frequently unbelievable. Though Bale's generic American performance grates from the start, the early scenes of street-fighting are gripping enough, with grungy, desaturated winter colours in the jittery camerawork by Zhang regular ZHAO Xiaoding 趙小丁, realistic sets by versatile Japanese production designer TANEDA Yohei 種田陽平, and mobile cutting by MENG Peicong 孟佩璁, who worked on Zhang's previous two films. But once the large cast of cynical whores, convent girls and Bale's John Miller are assembled in the cathedral — with visits from a brave Chinese soldier, good and bad Japanese officers, and leering Japanese troops — the script doesn't have a strong enough emotional or dramatic arc to cope with all the various stories.

From the start, the story is putatively seen through the eyes of teenage convent girl Shujuan — effectively played by 13-year-old Nanjinger ZHANG Xinyi 張歆怡 — who provides some voice-over and is given occasional point-of-view shots. But this focus is soon abandoned as others jostle for attention: the relationship between Miller and English-speaking chief courtesan Yumo (photogenic newcomer NI Ni 倪妮, also from Nanjing), the quarrelling prostitutes themselves (only a couple of whom establish any individuality), the young orphan boy who is the cathedral's only remaining inhabitant (slyly played by HUANG Tianyuan 黃天元), and military types like the Chinese Li (surprisingly well played by TONG Dawei 佟大為) and the sympathetic Hasegawa (reliable character actor WATABE Atsuro 渡部篤郎).

Though all the various personalities inter-act physically, their stories don't combine into a sustained drama. Both the Miller-Yumo love story and Miller's sudden, unconvincing conversion carry no emotional charge, especially with the unlikely English dialogue they're given (Yumo: "Even though you were a drunken bastard last night, what you did today makes you a hero") compared with the salty dialect between the whores.

Shanghai-born, Chinese-American Yan's original book, whose title literally means The 13 Hairpins of Jinling (referring to the courtesans and an ancient name for Nanjing), was inspired by the diary of US missionary Minnie Vautrin, head of a girls' school during the events. It's a moving, well-structured story in which the 13-year-old Shujuan, on the cusp of womanhood, is the central character, as narrated from the present day by her niece. Along with the other girls and the courtesans, there's also Father Ingleman (who's already dead by the time the film starts) and a small group of Chinese soldiers who also take refuge. By drastically reworking the original and shoehorning in Bale's mortician-cum-adventurer (who seems thinly inspired by the real-life John Rabe, a German businessman), Zhang & Co. have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in an effort to make a movie with international appeal.

Flowers is always a visual pleasure, and rates an extra point for Zhao's versatile photography, though, apart from the opening action scenes, it's difficult to see where such a huge budget by Chinese standards actually went. The film may turn out to be Zhang's biggest commercial success, but in almost every other respect it is the weakest and most conventional film of his career — and this from a director who's previously shown he can handle both operatic (Hero 英雄 (2002), Curse Of The Golden Flower 滿城盡帶黃金甲 (2006)) and emotionally fragile material (Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles 千里走單騎 (2005), Under the Hawthorn Tree 山楂樹之戀 (2010)). Excluding the deliberately stylised City of Life and Death, the definitive drama on the Rape of Nanjing still remains to be made.