Not the best film on the topic but well worth viewing

Rating: Null/10 (30 September 2013)

In the winter of 1936-37, the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, then the capital of China, was so unspeakably brutal that it was dubbed the rape of Nanjing. Most people in the West have never heard of the event but, in China, it is still an intensely raw issue. In recent years, two Chinese films have been made about the occupation. In 2009, there was "City Of Life And Death" directed by Lu Chuan. Then, in 2001, we had "Flowers Of War" directed by Zhang Yimou.
"City Of Life And Death", which is unquestionably the far superior work, made little effort to appeal to a Western audience, although it did have a European character - the real-life John Rabe, known as the German Schindler - as a key character. "The Flowers Of War", however, was deliberately pitched at a Western audience: the chosen director had achieved considerable acclaim (and rightly so) for films like "Hero" and "House Of Flying Daggers"; the central character is a (fictional) American mortician played by Christian Bale (echoes of his much earlier role in "Empire Of The Sun"); almost half its dialogue is in English; and it was accorded a massive budget of some $100M from the Chinese Government and state-backed banks. At the domestic (Chinese) box office, it proved to be the highest-grossing Chinese production of all time but, in the United States, it was a total flop.
The story - drawn from a novel - is actually a powerful one: convent girls and prostitutes, with seemingly nothing in common, thrown together as they take refuge from the marauding Japanese inside a Catholic church where the priest is dead and their only hope is a drunken Westerner. While it is an invented tale, the context in which it is told was all too real and nothing that is shown or hinted at comes near the horror of what actually happened. So "The Flowers Of War" does not have the strengths of the more realistic "City Of Life And Death" but it is well worth viewing and would be instructive to Americans who think the Second World War started with Pearl Harbor.