Review: The Flowers of War

The Flowers of War / Zhang Yimou / China / 2012

1 Bucket

After more than two decades of directing films that were mostly ignored by American audiences, the Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou struck box office gold with two martial arts-infused historical melodramas, 2002’s Hero and 2004’s House of Flying Daggers. Conveniently, they were among the best films of his career – masterpieces not only for their complicated action sequences, but for their dramatic force.

In light of the larger audience Zhang was able to cultivate with those pictures, it is unfortunate that his subsequent efforts have been disappointments – dumped into a handful of art-house and ethnic theaters not to thrive with niche groups, but to fall into obscurity. Continuing the slump initiated by the lavish-but-empty Curse of the Golden Flower and the failed remake exercise A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop is The Flowers of War, a dramatization of the Rape of Nanking that aspires to be Shakespearean but ends up cartoonish.

Even though it is situated within the real-life atrocity that resulted in 300,000 Chinese deaths, the central story of The Flowers of War is fictional. Christian Bale plays an alcoholic American mortician who poses as a priest in order to protect the occupants of a church—half schoolgirl orphans and half prostitutes seeking refuge, naturally—from rape and murder. You read that right – we’re meant to believe that the Imperial Japanese army respected a church as neutral ground simply because it had a bearded Bruce Wayne pretending to be its purveyor.

If the above synopsis makes the movie sound absurd, that’s because it is. In fact, the sequences of extreme violence in The Flowers of War are not disturbing for the obvious reasons; instead, they are disturbing because they are exploitative when juxtaposed against the hokum of the rest of the film. The reason for Zhang to tell a fictional account of these events was to make the emotions more accessible and personal for viewers, but ironically, by crafting such a soap opera-like narrative, he achieves the opposite effect. As if the silliness of the basic premise wasn’t enough, there is also a romance between Bale and one of the prostitutes that nearly extends into the realm of self-parody.

The visual compositions are immaculate—alternately beautiful and gritty—but that’s par for the course in a Zhang film (thanks to usual cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding). It’s every other area that’s problematic. Clearly, Zhang intended the inappropriately campy tone of The Flowers of War – this is evidenced by the fact that the actors, especially Bale, are in lock-step with it throughout. But how he envisioned this possibly working in a movie about the Rape of Nanking is a mystery. All one can hope for is that Zhang regains touch of the superior sensibility that defined him as a filmmaker for over two decades, for it helped create several movies that were not only better than The Flowers of War, but legitimately great.