City of Life and Death is a horrifying, raw depiction of what is commonly known as the “rape of Nanking,” when Japanese troops in WWII stormed into the capitol of China and killed and raped thousands of men, women, and children in the most gruesome manners unimaginable to men.
There was a time when the Nanking Massacre was feared to become extinct. It wasn’t being taught in schools, many Japanese refused to apologize or acknowledge the incident and so-forth. With the book written by Iris Chang, the memories of the event have been revitalized and many films have been released and are in production - most noticeably in my opinion Flowers of War which was previously titled The 13 Women of Nanjing by Zhang Yimou starring Christian Bale.
Yet with this revitalization in works such as John Rabe, none could be more controversial or gutsy as the decision to feature a sympathetic Japanese soldier as the chief protagonist. The very kind of person that is despised, in fact the unforgivable “bad guy” of the story. I applaud Lu Chuan’s decision to do so, as it not only provides another a rarely explored point of view on the matter, but asks questions and stirs debate to become a film that truly lives.
Lu Chuan explores a question that will not leave anybody’s mind: “How could men be driven to commit such barbaric acts?”
I have always wondered, what happens when you remove context from a human being and when you strip them of any sense of themselves. Are they inherently evil and barbaric? Through the protagonist, we understand that we are all human. Through the sequence of events Lu Chuan puts forth, he argues that the Japanese soldiers have been so desensitized and given so much freedom in such a lawless, moral-less playing field that they have allowed themselves permission to act to their very desire. Like he has said in many interviews, “To kill ruthlessly in a war, to callously violate a woman’s chastity, this, perhaps is in every man’s heart.”
The black and white photography is stunning; the contrast, the image that isn’t deteriorated by grain as well as the slow reveals by the camera and frantic situations. There are several long lens shots and focus pulls focused on individual Chinese characters that really bring out the detail in their skin and the eyes that describe these conflicting emotions that cannot be described with words. The water does not run red with blood however, which can be argued to be both beneficial and/or detrimental to the purpose of the film.
The film is honest. With that territory comes violence: severed heads hanging on wire, scenes of mass rape and thousands of soldiers being killed in mass. It holds nothing. Women are raped to death. The audience is left to be as vulnerable as it’s victims and as “curious” as the Japanese protagonist who views his comrades descent into madness.
I cannot conclude this without a brief tangent. This is what a war film should be, not some heroic Hollywood tale like Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan which immortalizes these battles as something both honorable and hideously difficult by some John Williams soundtrack. Many contemporary war films ignore one of the most important aspects of such: the human condition.
