CHINESE FILMS ARE THE TOP POLITICAL FILMS OF JUNE 2011
In a film that begins in 1899, with titles indicating the impoverishment of the Qing Dynasty and the growing power of the Boxers to expel foreigners from China, Empire of Silver (Baiyin Diguo) describes the banking system, with currency backed by silver, which emerged earlier but was on the verge of collapse when Nationalist Forces took over China. Perhaps unintended, the implication of the film, directed by Christina Yao and based on The Silver Valley, a 2009 book by Cheng Yi, is that the economy was finally stabilized by the Bank of China under the People’s Republic. Although leaders of the banking industry in Shanxi Province (China’s Wall Street), meet at one point in the film, the focus is on the third son (played by Aaron Kwok in the role of Third Master) of Lord Kang (played by Tielin Zhang). As family patriarch, he has carried on a tradition from his forbears, and he wants the family to carry forth the business. The first son, a deaf-mute, is incapable. The second son is too aggressive and dies. The fourth sun goes bonkers when his bride is kidnapped while honeymooning. But the third son, who is the most mentally capable of running the business, is haunted by a love problem in which traditional Chinese values compete with his emotions, so the tension in the film is father-son. During some of the film, the silver is carried to remote provinces to escape capture by hostile elements, and the impact of the Boxer Rebellion, Western intervention, and the Nationalist uprising underscores the fragility of Chinese capitalism. Cinematography and costuming outshine the staid performance. MH
City of Life and Death, may be too graphic for the fainthearted in exposing Japanese atrocities committed in China’s capital Nanjing during 1937. As in the film John Rabe (2010), the focal point of the film is the sanctuary provided by the German John Rabe (played by John Paisley) for foreigners, Chinese women and children, and wounded Chinese soldiers. But the unexpected star of the film is Kadokawa (played by Hideo Nakaizumi), a young Japanese soldier who appears dazed at first by what he sees in Nanjing, has sex for the first time with a “comfort woman” whom he considers to have married, and tries to maintain his self-respect while exercising command authority as a sergeant. Director Lu Chuan, filming in black and white with the Chinese title Nanjing! Nanjing!, seeks to portray the massacres (300,000 estimated killed), the executions of particular persons, rapes that sometimes resulted in dead female bodies being piled up on a wheelbarrow and carted away, the squalor, and much more. Nearly a docudrama of the worst human rights assault on a city in modern times, the Political Film Society has nominated City of Life and Death as the best film exposé of 2011 as well as best film on human rights and best film on war and peace. MH
Beginning of the Great Revival (Jian Dang Wei Ye) is epic in scale, beginning with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1911, formation of the Chinese Community Party on July 1, 1921, and leaps forward to 1941 without any mention of Chiang Kaishek. As Western powers have capitalized on the weakness of the empire, carving up concessions on the Shantung Peninsula and culminating in Japan’s 21 Demands of 1915, nationalistic responses emerge. A republic replaces the empire without a clear vision, so the chaos of the country increases. China sends troops to fight Germany in World War I but is frozen out of the peace settlement by Japan. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution, however, provides a model that inspires Mao Zedong (played by Ye Liu) and others. Directed by Han Sanping and Huang Jianxing, the purpose of the film is to explain why communism appealed to Chinese and how Mao assumed leadership. However, so much of the film consists of subtitles that the appropriate audiences are today’s schoolchildren in China who will surely realize that the purpose is propaganda. MH