Bale and Ni Ni.

In the dark history of human atrocity, one savage, inhuman chapter that is always missing from the textbooks in courses about the Pacific conflict in World War II is the Rape of Nanking. Except for the occasional documentary, this harrowing event has gone largely unexplored by filmmakers, yet it surges with historic value and the elements of heartbreaking drama. Ask history majors about what the Japanese did to freedom-loving civilians to alter the world and all they know is Pearl Harbor, Bataan and the Death March. Now the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou has made a valiant and compassionate effort to enlighten the ignorant. The Flowers of War is his best film since Raise the Red Lantern. It is emotionally shattering.

In the winter of 1937, after Japan conquered and destroyed Shanghai, Emperor Hirohito’s cruelty and ruthless thirst for power shifted to Nanking, the Chinese capital. More than 200,000 people were massacred, including the Chinese army, and only a handful of ordinary people fought to survive. Their bravery and heroism have become legendary in China. This is the true story of an American mortician named John Miller, brilliantly played by Christian Bale, who miraculously made his way through the fire, mortar and bombs to reach a Catholic cathedral to prepare a murdered Catholic priest for burial. When he reaches the church, a small altar boy is the only one left to offer shelter to the homeless. Having already missed the last boat out of the harbor before the Japanese takeover, John hides out in the church himself, sharing space with 13 terrified convent girls and a group of abandoned prostitutes from the Jade Paradise, a notorious brothel in the red-light district. As the fumes of powder and perfume waft up through the rafters, the painted women and the innocent virgins all turn to him as a kind of surrogate savior. Far from being a saint, he’s a thief, an adventurer and a drunken war profiteer. But he is also inexplicably transformed by the plight of these women and children to find a conscience he thought buried long ago—especially by a beautiful courtesan named Yu Mo, who begs, “If you help us, I will thank you in ways you can never imagine. All of us will.” It’s a plea, made to a lonely man who hasn’t been with a woman for years. It is also a challenge. The movie catalogues the events, large and small, in the lives of these dissimilar people—each one a flower growing up to the light through the filth and rubble of war—that bond them together with mutual respect to overcome prejudice, escape death and value life as an extraordinary gift, not to be taken lightly.

The Flowers of War is profoundly involving on many levels. Clocking in at 141 minutes, it requires patience, but the rewards are numerous. Zhang Yimou finds human revelations in small places and small faces, as seen both through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl, forced to age prematurely while she watches the brutality of aggression and conflict from a hole in a stained-glass window, and through the gun sights of the last Chinese soldier in Nanking, who sacrifices his chance to leave for one final act to save his people. This is a director who knows how to tell a story from many points of view by slowly building myriad characters simultaneously: the opportunist who risks his own life to save the convent girls from rape by dressing in the robe of a priest and becomes an accidental hero; the two prostitutes who meet a mortifying fate at the hands of Japanese soldiers when they return to the ruins of their bordello to retrieve a jewelry box that symbolizes a once-privileged life now destroyed forever; the father who goes to work for the enemy to get his daughter out of Nanking, but ends up wrongly labeled by her as an unforgivable traitor; even the Japanese commander who ploughs through grenades, corpses and crushing debris for one chance to play the cathedral organ. Zhang Yimou knows how to build characters gradually, until you get to know his roll call as friends but without the unnecessary exposition that burdens most historic war pieces. But the center of the film is still the whores themselves, who make the ultimate sacrifice to save the convent girls from Japanese gang rape, giving the lie to the cliché that prostitutes are “cold and heartless.” After six years in a convent as a child, beatific Yu Mo (called Mo by her friends) was raped by her stepfather when she was 13. She has empathy for the girls huddled together in the church. By the time she had reached their age, she was already forced to take her first clients. Her special appeal for the American is completely understandable. She has education, she speaks perfect English with a mandarin accent, and she’s the one who devises the courageous plan to save the virgins from tragedy by enlisting the help of the other whores. The tableau of sewing the drapes into uniforms to trick the enemy soldiers with sex, binding their breasts to pretend they are teenagers, and using their professional skills to do one last thing in life that is honorable while John, posing as the priest, drives the children across the border using Communion wine as a bribe—well, the whole sequence rendered me silent with heartbreak. The film mercifully shields the viewer from too much graphic gore and brutality in the interests of finding an audience. But the imagination is unmistakably fueled. Instead of shock value, the director concentrates on individual acts of heroism, masterfully conveyed and emotionally wrenching.

Zhang Yimou (pronounced “Johnny-moo”) used to be a cinematographer, so his films are always sumptuous. From the colorful costumes of the courtesans performing a Chinese folk song to the ashes of the city in ruin, every image is evocative. The music is magical and gorgeous. Without exception, the richness of the cross-cultural performances really resonates. It’s rare for a bankable star like Christian Bale to collaborate with a foreign director and appear in a film of this magnitude, but having once appeared as an English boy trapped in Japan’s invasion of China in Steven Spielberg’s great 1987 film Empire of the Sun, he has remained intrigued by the period. With an unheard-of budget for a Chinese film of $100 million, his diligent work and the punishment of the no-frills location shooting in China pay off handsomely. He is just one element in a haunting panorama of a war that illuminated the bleakest corners of despair with unexpected acts of decency and valor, but he fits in majestically with the rest of the massive ensemble. In the role of Yu Mo, Zhang Yimou has discovered a new Gong Li in the luminous, radiant actress Ni Ni. At 23, she is on her way to what I predict will be a big career. The Flowers of War is not perfect. The film is too long, with so many characters it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart. But it’s a special film of sacrifice, redemption and hope in the shadow of a holocaust that packs an emotional wallop from which there is no escape. I can’t get it out of my thoughts, and I recommend it highly.

rreed@observer.com

THE FLOWERS OF WAR

Running Time 141 minutes

Written by Heng Liu (screenplay) and Geling Yan (novel)

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Starring Christian Bale, Ni Ni and Xinyi Zhang

3/4

The Nazis have begun their liquidation of Lvov, randomly murdering Jews for the sport of it and trucking away thousands to concentration camps. Here is a time and place of torture and death where everyone steals from everyone else to stay alive and nobody can be trusted—especially a sour and burly hamhock of a sewer worker and petty thief named Leopold Socha. Between robberies, he one day encountered some Polish Jews trying to escape from the ghetto before the Gestapo found them. For a price, he showed them how to climb down from a hole in the street into the murk and foul-smelling slime of the underground tunnels. Living with rats, eating a raw onion if they were lucky, separating from their families, giving birth to children surrounded by excrement, they miraculously survived for 14 months. When their money ran out, this accidental hero and his hardened, calloused wife above ground somehow discovered a conscience they didn’t know they had and protected their “children of war” from one near-fatal mishap after the next. In time, the lives of dependants and reluctant saviors alike intertwine with such inspired candor and force that the ensemble cast literally takes on the souls of the characters. They are so real that after a while you forget you are watching actors at all. This is especially true of Robert Wieckiewicz, an expressive and celebrated stage star in Poland who does wonders depicting the conflicting moral and religious instincts of Socha, a tough, emotionally detached sewer inspector and predatory crook whose criminal instinct for self-protection was betrayed by his new-found empathy for the disenfranchised. Only a handful of his Jews came through the ordeal alive, but the real Socha has since been honored for his humanitarian efforts, along with other brave Poles who altered human destiny by saving persecuted Jews from the gas chambers—specifically Oskar Schindler.

Warsaw-born director Holland, whose native epics about World War II, such as Europa, Europa, have always surpassed her more commercial English-speaking work (The Secret Garden, Washington Square), does such a thorough job depicting authenticity that the filth and degradation of the claustrophobic sewer eventually get to you. There’s an actual childbirth and the smothering of a baby I could not watch, as well as a deathly flood that proves to be an act of betrayal. It is to the credit of a sound screenplay by David Shamoon that the film carefully balances the fear and selfishness of the victims without sentimentality. Neither Socha nor the Jews are angels. Some of them are despicable on both sides of the equation. Without overdoing the atrocities, Ms. Holland attempts to illustrate the many cruel aspects of war’s effects on its victims as well as its perpetrators. The title is apropos, because most of the film submerges the viewer into a labyrinthine subterranean blackness that makes it difficult to share the experiences. We squint to watch them, and struggle to feel the sexual and emotional attractions that keep their minds from closing the bridge to insanity.

In Darkness is gloomy and hard to take for a running time of 145 minutes, but it’s an important film, related with deep conviction, and uncompromising in its understanding of the remarkable things members of the human race have done—to, for, and against each other—in the wilderness of war.

rreed@observer.com

IN DARKNESS

Running Time 145 minutes

Written by David F. Shamoon

Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Starring Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann and Agnieszka Grochowska

3.5/4

Scott Thomas.

The versatile and accomplished Kristin Scott Thomas works skillfully in both English and French. In Sarah’s Key she is never less than perfect doing both. It’s another in a long line of harrowing stories about the horrors of the Holocaust, but don’t let that deter you. It’s more a detective story than a depressing diary of atrocity, as it tells dual narratives set in 1942 and the present. Based on the popular novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, director Gilles Paquet-Brenner has done an elegant job of reducing a complex piece with many components into a riveting narrative that grabs you by the lapels and refuses to loosen its grip.

Paris. July 1942. A 10-year-old Jewish girl named Sarah Starzynski (Mélusine Mayance) hears disturbing noises in the street outside her family’s apartment in the Marais district. Panic spreads through the neighborhood with the inevitable sound of fists banging on doors. It’s not the dreaded Nazis who drag the Jews away and imprison them in the stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, but the French police, under orders from the Vichy government, who round up their own people. Little Sarah makes a valiant attempt to save at least one member of her family by hiding her baby brother in a locked bedroom closet and taking the key, promising she’ll be back to rescue him. How could she know her family would never return? In one of the most scandalous chapters of cowardice, fear and treachery in the history of France, 13,000 Jews were herded into trucks and shipped to concentration camps. It’s the same political theme and historical setting of Joseph Losey’s great 1976 film, Mr. Klein, with Alain Delon.

Cut to 2009. Julia Jarmond (Kristin Scott Thomas), an American journalist who has lived in Paris for 20 years, is assigned to write an article about the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium and the part it played in this shameful footnote to World War II history. Moving with her French husband into a new home that has been in his family for 60 years, her sleuthing reveals it’s the same apartment that was occupied by Sarah when her family was dispossessed and deported, and she becomes obsessed with telling the story of the family that used to live there. Both stories, half a century apart, cut back and forth, and the 1942 events are not for the faint of heart. The conditions inside the stadium, with no air, water or toilets, are somber to the point of repugnance as Mr. Paquet-Brenner spares no detail: the sewage, the bodies hurled from the roof, the bodies packed like rotting sardines into trucks to the transit camps where men and women were forcibly separated and their screaming children abandoned in confusion and terror. The chapters unfold like the pages of a book you can’t put down: as Sarah risks her life to hold onto the key to the door where she hid her 4-year-old brother, a family of farmers hides her from the Germans, and she eventually works her way to Paris to find what’s inside the secret cupboard.

In the contemporary story, Julia uncovers the guilt her in-laws feel, jeopardizing her marriage in her tireless efforts to find out what happened to Sarah. The story filters through generations of people with different family names and identities as it traces a labyrinthine story from Paris to Florence to New York, where the story ends with an American (sensitively played by Aidan Quinn) who ties up the loose threads in ways that are a shock to everyone, including himself. Painful, blood-curdling and ultimately heartbreaking, Sarah’s Key occasionally moves too ponderously for its own good, but its myriad elements are coherent and easy to follow. The results will keep you on the edge of your seat. As a mystery about the consequences of a deplorable period of political crime in occupied France, and as a tale about how dredging up the past has a ripple effect on the present, Sarah’s Key is full of engaging surprise elements. From start to finish, the opaque performance by Ms. Thomas is emotionally moving as she comes to terms with the secrets of the past as they relate to her own life, proving the theory that truth often has a very high price indeed.

rreed@observer.com

SARAH’S KEY

Running time 111 minutes

Written by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and Serge Joncour

Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner

Starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Mélusine Mayance, Aidan Quinn

3/4