Little is known worldwide about one of
the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century, The Second Sino-Chinese
war, that began in 1937 spanning all the way to 1945. During that war many
fierce atrocities have been made by Japanese, amongst which the so called
Nanking massacre ranks as one of the goriest.
Nanking
was the capital of China and fell in to Japanese arms in 1937, resulting in
thousands dead soldiers and civilians, as well as some 300.000 women raped.
That’s right, 300 THOUSAND.
Young
Chuan Lu
directs his epic war drama masterpiece around those historical facts bringing us
some of the creepiest, most brutal and heart stabbing individual stories behind
the numbers of casualties. Camera is simply flawless, climaxing the massive
scenes and wide angles as well as the effervescent focus exchange. Screenplay
is the world for itself, bringing some of the most striking characters into the
genre of war drama, a short but mighty Chinese soldier Lu (Buster Keaton like
Ye Liu),
unbelievably potent Sino-civilians Mr. Tang (Wei Fan) and Mrs. Jiang
(Yuanyuan Gao),
as well as the immortal male lead, Japanese soldier Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi).
Performances will be extraordinary, as well as the timeless lines overflowing
from every major scene and twist in the story. The patriotism will be
omnipresent, but so discreet and reduced to a symbolic level that you won’t
even sense it. There will even be a place for some seed of hope. Tiny one, but undoubted.
Forget
about „Schindler's list”, „Pianist” or even the „Son of Saul”. Chinese „Nanjing! Nanjing!”
(original title) is the ultimate war movie, war drama and holocaust drama!
„City of life and death” is one of those movies that you will be able to watch only once, but also one the flicks that you’ll remember for life. I’ll guarantee that.
„City of life and death” is one of those movies that you will be able to watch only once, but also one the flicks that you’ll remember for life. I’ll guarantee that.
No comments:
Post a Comment