City of Life and Death (2009)
City of Life and Death (2009) 7/10
Director Lu Chuan who is easily one of the more exciting directors from China, follows up his excellent Kekexili (2004) with a sobering and powerful take on The Nanking Massacre. The City of Life and Death (known as Nanking! Nanking in its chinese title) would seem like the sort of film that would lend well to easy moralising especially since it is a Mainland Chinese film. But to his credit, Lu Chuan is a far more nuanced director and doesn’t take the easy cinematic short cut of caricatured villians and saintly good guys. The solid black and white cinematography is beautifully shot, but i question the need to use black and white when a color version would be better. Using black and white for a WW2 film almost seems like aping Schindler’s List and unless you can use it to great effect, it seems like an unnecessary gesture. It is not that B&W doesn’t work for the film, but rather that i think color would have been better.
Still Lu Chuan crafts a great ensemble tale, with no one character being a plot device and each contributing to the tale in their own way. This is good because these supporting actors really shine when given the spotlight, with chinese actor Wei Fan making a memorable impression as Mr Tang. However, the disadvantage is that stars like Ye Liu don’t have much screen time for character development. The cast is uniformly solid, but i felt that the Japanese lead Hideo Nakaizumi as Kadokawa is too one dimensionally nice for my liking.
While City of Life and Death isn’t quite Schindler’s List, it is however an excellent retelling of the Naking Massacre seen through the eyes of both the Chinese and Japanese. And considering how the film strives to be balanced rather than jingoistically patriotic, the film is truly another feather in the cap of Lu Chuan who delivers a powerful and compelling movie experience and history lesson all wrapped in one.
