Redemption

Rating: 9/10 (27 August 2013)

This is an engrossing, beautiful, and at the same time horrific film, a vignette into the infamous 1937 Japanese Rape of Nanking. Taken apart from its historical context, it is a movie about redemption and sacrifice.
The movie opens with a battle scene, Japanese troops randomly and brutally gunning down anyone in their path. Among the innocents caught in the literal crossfire are John Miller, an American mortician in Nanking to handle the burial of a deceased Christian priest, and a group of schoolgirls who happen to be studying at the same school the deceased priest led. All take refuge in the church grounds, ostensibly safe from Japanese aggression.
Miller is a dissolute sort, rather unlikeable at the start, though later on he gives a hint as to why he might have become that way, as well as to why he is able to transform himself into a more heroic figure as the film develops. As the last remaining male adult on the church grounds, Miller becomes the unintentional leader of the flock. He and the girls, who share the grounds with a young male acolyte named George, are soon joined by a group of fleeing Chinese prostitutes, who believe the church might be a safe zone in the carnage of Nanking. That proves to be only partly true.
Before Miller's transformation, he views the church merely as his safe zone, albeit full of the temptations the church no doubt preaches against. When Japanese soldiers do what Japanese soldiers did in Nanking during the 1937 massacre, the inner moral fiber and paternal instincts of Miller begins to surface and as a faux priest he tries to protect the young girls. He is only partially successful.
Like Miller, most of the prostitutes begin their stay in the church by behaving crudely and selfishly. A young wounded victim of the fighting, dropped off at the church by one of the last remaining Chinese soldiers, serves as the canvass on which the women's compassion begins to express itself. Their transformation, too, has begun.
Eventually not even the church walls can keep out the Japanese brutality and evil, and Japanese command---who are unaware the prostitutes are hiding beneath the church---announce they will take the girls away, ostensibly for a celebration of their savagery in Nanking. Miller tries to sugar coat the girls' fate, but his own emotionalism betrays the horrible truth: that the children will be used as sex slaves and then butchered.
The girls decide suicide is preferable to enslavement, and they plan to jump from the church steeple and end their lives. Miller and the women talk them out of it. One of the women offers to trade places with one of the girls, and tries to convince her colleagues to do the same. She argues that a lifetime of shame can be wiped away, and the image of the women changed for all time, if they offer their bodies as a sacrifice on behalf of the girls. Slowly the other women come around and agree to do the same, while Miller's role---as a practicing mortician---is to modify the women's appearance through make-up to make them appear younger than they are and be able to fool the Japanese.
When the group falls one short, George argues that he can be made to appear as a young girl and can replace the last of the schoolchildren.
The drama of the film peaks at this point of supreme sacrifice, and the eventual removal of the reconfigured women, plus the escape of Miller and the children once the Japanese guards are gone, are essentially epilogue.
The film is at once brutal and horrific, but also inspirational and uplifting as it showcases the absolute worst and best humanity can offer. While many might argue it is propaganda, it is undeniable, except perhaps in Japanese textbooks, that such brutality took place. This movie also reminds the viewer that in such circumstances there is also courage of a type few can imagine and sacrifice that should shame the Japanese into finally coming to terms with their horrific past. The film follows Zhang's characteristic style, and some may feel that this may have taken some of the edge off of the violence, lending it a perverse beauty and diminishing the full extent of the horror. Perhaps it was used to soften the blow of the abject savagery that was the reality of Japan's aggression, make the movie slightly more palatable, and not detract from the central message which was about redemption and sacrifice. Even with the effects, however, there is violence that is often shocking.
The acting across the board is superb, with standouts being George (Huang Tianyuan), Shu (Xinyi Zhang) and Miller (Christian Bale). Ni Ni (as Yu Mo) may well have turned in a great performance, but her character is so lovely, physically and emotionally, that I am probably biased. Some argue that Bale performed below his usual norm, but I disagree. He was reserved, rather than over the top as someone like Sean Penn would have been, and he used a lot of subtlety in conveying, via facial expression, his bucking up to meet the challenge and his often failed attempts to rein in his emotions so that neither the girls nor the women would notice. Some also say his delivery was stilted owing to the written dialog, but again I disagree and feel both the dialog and the delivery are consistent with the time. People did speak differently in 1937, and people do speak differently when they are addressing others whose first language is not English, at least those with a good deal of cross cultural experience.
Movies and stories are going to strike everyone differently, but I would guess many who view this one will be moved, and shaken, and inspired as much as they have viewing any film. This one stays with you, in ways both good and bad.