Emotionally charged film on historic massacre

Rating: 6/10 (17 December 2011)

This film tells the story of a group of Nanjing prostitutes, a group of young Chinese Catholic Nuns, and a dissolute American, Christian Bale, who take refuge at a Catholic church during the Japanese massacre at Nanjing. Chinese director Zhang Yimou directs this sometimes engrossing, sometimes melodramatic movie. The film begins with a sort of "Saving Private Ryan" battle scene between Japanese troops and Chinese Nationalist forces, with the later efforts of a single Chinese soldier who survives this first encounter straining credulity in single-handed combat with a regiment of Japanese soldiers.
The film strongly focuses on the self-sacrifice of the prostitutes who wish to save the young teenage Chinese nuns. Bale's character, John Miller, also finds redemption in his efforts to help the young girls survive, and in his own self-sacrifice when he forgoes an opportunity to escape Nanjing. Miller also finds love with one of the prostitutes, but the physical consummation of his love seems out of place in a city filled with death and rape. The film actually manages a few hard-to- believe developments in its story, but it will undoubtedly succeed in pulling more than a few Western movie-goer's heart strings.
There have been early accusations that Zhang has made a piece of propaganda filming for China's leaders. The portrayal of Japanese soldiers has been described as one-dimensional, but I don't think the film is any worse than several Western film's depictions of German Nazis, such as in The Pianist, Schindler's List and others. Besides, the most conservative estimates assert tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped by the Japanese during the Nanjing Massacre, and many tens of thousands of Chinese were butchered, so this is not a movie about a routine city siege of the Second World War. Having said that, it does not seem as though Chinese government financial support for another in a string of recent films about the Nanjing Massacre is the best possible method for improving Sino-Japanese relations.