City of Life and Death

From The Bridge on the River Kwai onwards, the Japanese haven’t tended to come up smelling of roses in war movies. Kind of unsurprisingly. In recent years it was Clint Eastwood who moved the story on. In Flags of Our Fathers he painted the Japanese military as the yellow peril, but gave them the benefit of the doubt in Letters from Iwo Jima, the other half of his Pacific diptych. City of Life and Death attempts to do in one film what Eastwood split into two: a portrait of the Japanese war machine as a manifestation of pitiless amorality; and the component parts of that machine as sentient human beings (at least some of them, anyway).

The odd thing is that it’s the work of a Chinese director, Lu Chuan. No wonder the film had a rocky initiation in China. It tells of the six weeks from December 1937 when the Japanese Imperial Army entered Nanking, the then Chinese capital, and laid waste to hundreds of thousands of lives. While Nanking denial has not been criminalised in Japan, the atrocity remains a political hot potato. They call it the Nanking Massacre in China. In Japan it’s merely the Nanking Incident. When City of Life and Death opened in China a year ago (with the title Nanjing! Nanjing!) Lu received death threats, there were calls for the film to be erased from the history of Chinese cinema, and it was withdrawn at the last minute from the Chinese equivalent of the Baftas. On the other hand, it took $30 million in its first two-and-a-half weeks and last month won best film at the Asian Film Awards.

Lu’s solecism, in the eyes of some, was to humanise the enemy. The crimes committed against the people of Nanking are meticulously and unsparingly enacted (apart from the Caligulan womb skewerings which, though documented, Lu has chosen to omit). There is one bravura sequence in which City of Life and Death feels like a compendium of every World War Two atrocity ever committed to film. Sniped bodies afloat in the lapping tide were the hors d’oeuvre of Saving Private Ryan. A barn heaving with humanity, bolted then torched, was terrifyingly staged by Elem Klimov in Come and See. Long lines of kneeling prisoners dispatched in trenches: see also Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn. And who remembers the heads of buried victims peeping out of their sandy tombs from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence? Here you get it all in five minutes. The only barbaric practice you might struggle to source are the decapitated heads dangling upside down on string. They feel like a more medieval style of carnage.

But as a dramatic counterbalance Lu has chosen to unload the dice. When the Japanese move into the city, the only looting they get up to at first is cracking open the odd abandoned bottle of pop. Then, after they’ve unleashed hell, a sergeant called Kudokawa wanders through the charnel house looking profoundly shaken by the senseless acts of savagery visited by his compatriots on soldiers and civilians. In between killing and raping, the conquerors relax by the beach doing high jumps, dancing, and fantasising about food. Even their comfort women, travelling prostitutes supplied for the relief of military libidos, are portrayed as brutalised victims of war.

Lu has calculated that, without at least a couple of Japanese characters undergoing their own psychic trauma, there’s a shortage of dramatic balance. Not that there’s too much doubt whose side he’s on. “In memory of the 300,000 victims of the Nanking Massacre,” runs the initial dedication, despite the fact that the official tribunal after the war fixed the figure at 200,000. China has always rounded the figure up, the Japanese down.

The Chinese are, for the most part, ennobled as victims. There’s one silly girl who refuses to chop her hair off as the Imperial visitors, having killed off the prisoners of war, embark on their campaign of systematic rape. There’s another soldier who is more interested in survival than honour. But a city full of people facing annihilation offers a surprisingly thin palette of emotional colours: resourcefulness and bravery, panic and terror. When one set of prisoners are mown down in cold blood by machine gun, Lu takes the opportunity to canonise them even as they are being, as it were, cannonised. “Long live China!” they scream. “China shall not perish!” And the plangent school-of-John Williams chords swoop in on the soundtrack as the bullets find their target. Shostakovich would have done the trick better.

On a canvas where the numbers are so vast, the effort to find human stories is a case of needles and haystacks. A more obvious route was taken by City of War: The Story of John Rabe, a Sino-German film coincidentally released this month too, which takes a European-eye view. Rabe, a Schindleresque Nazi who saved many thousands of lives by setting up a safety zone in Nanking, has no more than a supporting role in Lu’s film. In one scene, he has the grim task of persuading 100 women to volunteer for sexual service to win protection for their fellow citizens.

Instead Lu picks out various figures whose stories collectively embody the Chinese version of Nanking: the honourable soldiers and blameless civilians who were killed, and the young and lucky ones who survived to testify and, by implication, build a new China. This is the one area where the film is deficient in subtlety and shade. (You do also wonder if everyone in Nanking in December 1937 was quite as good-looking.) In every other respect, City of Life and Death is a work of symphonic ambition.

As a painter on celluloid, Lu creates remarkable tableaux, and edits them for maximum impact. He’s particularly good at filling the screen with heaving humanity. The camera rises slowly over a mound to reveal a field of twisted corpses. A heap of naked women, freshly raped and killed, are wheeled away on a barrow. A ceremonial display of drumming and dancing choreographs the victors’ slaughter as ritual.

It hardly needs adding that the film is in black and white. As with Schindler’s List – Lu knows his Spielberg as well as his Riefenstahl – it would have been somehow vulgar to go down the Technicolor route. As if that weren’t enough technological regression, sometimes it almost feels like a silent movie too. Where necessary, Lu has Sergio Leone’s disdain for dialogue. But then he counterpoints long tumbleweed silences with bursts of earsplitting Sturm und Drang.

“Everyone dies in the end,” says one animal Japanese officer, although his end was a while in coming. According to the biographical details supplied at the end of the film, he lived till 1974. In Lu’s redemptive conclusion, others take the more honourable course.

• City of Life and Death is on release from today
• Watch the trailer on YouTube