City of Life and Death

Grim. That's one word to sum up City of Life and Death, an unflinching account of the Rape of Nanking where hundreds of thousands men, women and children perished at the hands of the Japanese soldiers that invaded the then Chinese capital in 1937. But no word would do it justice... This is a film to be endured, not enjoyed.

Chuan Lu's film opens as the Japanese bomb the city into submission, followed by guerrilla street fighting as the woefully under prepared Chinese troops offer what resistance they can. It's futile and what defenders are left soon desert, discarding their uniforms so they will blend in with the civilian population. Within a week, all the POWS are killed (for 'killed' read 'rounded up into groups of hundreds and mowed down with machine guns'; some are buried alive). As Japanese patrols move through the city to seek out Chinese troops in hiding, the women of Nanking are subjected to horrendous hardships.

Nanking has been the subject of various films and documentaries before with Black Sun, Don't Cry, Nanking and John Rabe among others. Chuan Lu's film, with its handheld camera and observational style, could be classified as a documentary but for two major elements. Through the confusion and the terror and the rape and the mass murders, Chuan Lu's camera finds two individuals and attempts to tell Nanking's story through their eyes: Japanese Sergeant Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) and the kindly Mr. Tang (Wei Fan). This isn't as successful as the director hopes, who has courted controversy and has received death threats for his 'sympathetic' portrayal of the Japanese soldier. We never really get to know either man and both characters are drawn in broad strokes.

Shot in B&W, City of Life and Death will garner comparisons to Schindler's List, but where that found humour and heart in the exchanges between Neeson and Ben Kingsley, there's no such shelter here. This is unrelenting misery laid bare. The B&W adds to the tone of the film, but it also makes the Japanese and Chinese indistinguishable from each other as uniforms clash - maybe Chuan Lu is saying that it wasn't just that Japan committed this atrocity on China, it was people who did it to people. This is what humanity is capable of - the horror and the heroic.

Caution is advised before deciding on this one, but City of Life and Death will become impossible to forget. One scene sees a child thrown out of window. It's that kind of film.