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

in every way a gentler, simpler and sweeter movie than another highly praised

Scandinavian film, Mifune , which did

not. From a screenplay by Mr. Nutley, in collaboration with Johanna Hald and

David Neal, and based on the short story "The Little Farm" by H. E. Bates, Under the

Sun doesn't strain for laughs or even chuckles, but tells its story of

sexual awakening in midlife with a lyrical feeling for nature and all its

sensuous metaphors for human desire. The engaging sentiment is balanced with a

touch of suspenseful melodrama that remains true to its characters.

It is the summer of 1956 in the lush Swedish countryside.

Middle-aged Olof (Rolf Lassgård) is living alone on his family's small farm

after the recent death of his mother. He can neither read nor write, and he has

never slept with a woman. He depends on a slyly teasing young friend named Erik

(Johan Widerberg) to help him with the chores around the farm and to do his

shopping in town. Erik plays the man of the world for the provincial Olof,

since he has been to sea many times and has worked in America.

Now he scrapes by with a part-time job as a gravedigger, and with the help of

Olof's "temporary" loans.

One day Olof can bear his loneliness no longer, and so he

drives into town to place an advertisement in the local paper. He is too

embarrassed to admit that he can't read or write when he asks the kindly newspaper receptionist (Gunilla Röör) to take down his

dictation for an ad: "Lonely farmer, 39, own car. Seeks young

lady housekeeper. Photograph appreciated." The receptionist looks at

Olof with knowing sympathy. When Olof returns the following week, there are two

responses to his ad: The first comes without a photo, and the receptionist

crinkles her face in comic negation when Olof asks her advice. It is a moment

of spiritual communion. Fortunately, the second reply comes with a stunning

photograph, which we never see because the action cuts immediately to Ellen

(Helena Bergström) at the train stop, waiting for Olof to pick her up. She is

attractive beyond his wildest dreams, and he cannot believe his good luck. She

seems amused by his shyness and awkwardness, but always with a smile of

friendly curiosity.

When Erik catches sight of Ellen, he is immediately hostile

and suspicious. He warns Olof to watch his step, since Ellen is clearly after

something besides the unimposing Olof. Erik's cynical courtship of a local girl

named Lena (Linda Ulvaeus) runs parallel to Ellen's

generous opening up of herself to Olof. Since Lena

slightly resembles Ellen in their mutual blondness, a strange thought crossed

my mind: Was Mr. Nutley creating a shrewd misunderstanding for the benefit of

the coming attractions to make it seem that Erik and Olof were pursuing the

same woman?

As it happens, Erik is less a part of a triangle than he is

a petulantly mischievous poltergeist who, faced with the prospect of losing a

soft touch in Olof, unearths Ellen's mystery and, by threatening to expose her,

almost breaks up the happy couple. To the end, Erik is a Class A name-dropper,

claiming to have met Elvis Presley, Grace Kelly and Greta Garbo-but when he

announces that he is shipping out on an Italian ocean liner, the ill-fated Andrea Doria , I wondered how many people

will realize that he is announcing his own doom and comeuppance?

Though filmed in Sweden, throughout Under

the Sun I felt an Irish mood, largely because of the distinctively Celtic

musical score of Paddy Maloney of the Chieftains. Combine that with Erik's

showbiz Americanisms and Mr. Nutley's strange background as a British-born,

British-bred and British-trained filmmaker relocated to Sweden, and you begin to wonder if this is still the land of Ingmar Bergman, and if there is still anything in the world that

answers to the definition of an authentic national cinema.

Behind the Music: Turandot

Allan Miller's The

Turandot Project is a film I look forward to seeing again and again and

again. While working on a movie about Chinese composer Zhao Jiping, Mr. Miller

heard that Chinese film director Zhang Yimou and conductor Zubin Mehta were

joining forces to bring a new production of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot to the stage in Florence.

He and his producer, Margaret Smilow, seized the opportunity to document the

director, the conductor and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence.

Zhang Yimou, never having directed an opera before Turandot , was the first to admit that he

would have to make many concessions to technicians with more experience in the

form. In the film, one of the technicians questions the wisdom of using a movie

director at all, though the technician concedes that, for young people around

the world, movies are the only medium and that opera has sadly been abandoned

to the oldsters.

Mr. Mehta recalls Zhang Yimou admitting, "I don't know

anything about opera …. Mehta can do all the music … whatever is heard is up to

him, but what they see is mine." When everyone decided to bring the production

to Beijing, Mr. Miller decided to

continue filming: "Mehta and Zhang Yimou just opened themselves up to us, or

let us pry them open," he said.

By shooting both the Italian and Chinese productions of Turandot , Mr. Miller was able to show

Mr. Zhang constructing two extremely different interpretations of the opera. In

Florence,  Mr. Zhang chose to stage the opera

according to the helter-skelter traditions of the Peking

opera. Hence, all the costumes were made from different periods in order to be

more striking.

But when the production moved to Beijing,

and the opera was performed on a Ming Dynasty stage-temple, Mr. Zhang decided

that a massive change was necessary. "The Chinese would laugh you off the stage

if you showed 17th- or 18th-century costumes on a 15th-century stage."

Consequently, thousands of local people had to be recruited to sew and

embroider new costumes for the opera, at a cost of about $600,000. Because the

stage provided by the Forbidden City was so vast, it was

able to accommodate every element of Mr. Zhang's grandiose vision. Three

hundred Chinese soldiers from an army battalion dressed elaborately as Ming

Dynasty warriors, as well as acrobats who accompanied the action and onstage

Ming Dynasty drummers who announced the appearance of the Emperor, saturated

the huge stage with a literal recreation of a bygone era. But still Mr. Zhang

was not satisfied.

His fiercest quarrels were with a world-renowned Viennese

lighting expert who preferred the European-style selective illumination of the

key areas of dramatic emphasis. Mr. Zhang argued that this meant that much of

the stage would be darkened from time to time, and this would never do with

Chinese audiences, who preferred total illumination. At one point, Mr. Zhang

ruefully observed that it was much easier to direct a movie than to direct an

opera. On the movie set, his word was law and his orders were carried out

immediately, whereas on the opera set there were many conflicting voices,

making all sorts of compromises inevitable.

What comes through most strongly in The Turandot Project -besides the overpowering magnetic force of the

opera itself, its singers and musicians, and its

charismatically diplomatic conductor, Zubin Mehta-is the anxiety of Mr. Zhang

over the technical and artistic adequacy of his beloved Chinese people.

Ironically, Mr. Zhang was the greatest initial obstacle to the staging of Turandot in Beijing.

The government has never approved of Mr. Zhang because his films fail to show a

flattering portrait of Chinese society to outsiders. So here we are confronted

with the supreme irony of the forbidden director finally permitted to work in

the Forbidden City. And yet Mr. Zhang's exhortations to

his Chinese subordinates ring with the urgency of a true patriot.

Of course, the music of Puccini (1858-1924), even in dribs

and drabs, has a lot to do with my unbridled enthusiasm for this account of the

fusion of two cultures, one based in Florence

and the other in Beijing. Mr.

Miller is an old hand at music documentaries, having directed 35; he's won two

Academy Awards-for The Bolero and From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China -and an Emmy for his

film about classical violinist Itzhak Perlman. He also directed Small Wonders (1996), about violin

teacher Roberta Guaspari-Tzavaras, which received an Oscar nomination and

served as the basis for the feature-length movie Music of the Heart (1999), directed by Wes Craven and featuring

Meryl Streep, Aidan Quinn, Angela Bassett and Cloris Leachman. In spite of his

extraordinary track record in the genre, Mr. Miller says that filming Zhang

Yimou and Zubin Mehta in Turandot was

the culmination of all his work on music.

In the final analysis, however, it is not any one thing that

makes The Turandot Project a stirring

entertainment, but a glorious mix of things that

give rise to half-forgotten dreams of people of good will crossing national and

cultural borders and barriers to come together to complete a project bigger

than any individual, bigger than any ideology, bigger than any single

nationality. But is it only art that functions in this privileged realm? And if

so, can it be extended to treat all the world's seemingly incurable

afflictions?

If only Ireland,

the Balkans, the Middle East, and so much of Africa

and Asia could be treated to the spectacle of smiling

Chinese translators mollifying the most temperamental of operatic divas,

perhaps world peace would at last be conceivable. Till then, the warm feelings

generated by The Turandot Project

will have to suffice.

Home , from a screenplay by Bao Shi, based on his novel Remembrance , is quite simply the best and most emotionally engaging

film I have seen this year. It has a seemingly naïve idealism and virtue in a

cinematic cosmos drenched with "neo-noir" cynicism and brutality. In some ways,

The Road Home reminds me of a time

when Hollywood specialized in heroic biographies of even the humblest and least

charismatic benefactors of humankind, much to the disdain of supposedly

sophisticated intellectuals. But The Road

Home is perhaps more aptly compared with the more memorable memory films of

John Ford, which is to say that The Road

Home is a beautifully resonant work of art.

A measure of Mr. Yimou's artistic ambition is his chromatic

division of the narrative between a black-and-white present and a brightly

colored past. The black-and-white section of the film begins in contemporary

China with the return of a city businessman, Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), to his

native village after the sudden death of his father. His elderly mother, Zhao

Di (Zhao Yuelin), flatly rejects her son's suggestion that the coffin be

transported by tractor from the distant hospital where he died to his family's

burial site, located outside the local school where he taught for many years.

Men must bear the coffin. Zhao Di also insists that Luo bring her the family's

decrepit loom so that she can weave a funeral cloth for her husband. The image

of the old woman laboriously weaving the funeral cloth sets the stage for

parallel shots of Zhao Di at 18 (played by Zhang Ziyi) working at the same loom

in a chaste but madly passionate pursuit of Luo's father, Luo Changyu (Zheng

Hao), the village teacher.

The lyrical and

color-inflamed past of Luo's parents unfolds only after Luo can confer with the

village elders on the difficult task of hiring enough men to carry the coffin

over 10 miles of snowy terrain-known by custom as "the road home"-so that his

father will find his home in the next world. Sanhetun, the village in North

China where Luo was born, is later seen in all its spring glory when the young

Zhao Di catches a glimpse of her future husband and loses her heart forever.

But the courtship is far from easy. Changyu, as an educated

teacher, belongs to a higher class than Zhao Di, and China is still governed by

the rules of arranged marriages. To complicate matters further, Changyu is

taken away by the agents of the Cultural Revolution and returned to the city

for political reeducation. Zhao Di waits for what seems to be an eternity for

his return and then, feverish from the cold, sets out for the city to find him.

We know, of course, that everything will end happily for the two lovers as far

as the consummation of their passion is concerned. But the bare bones of the

plot and the incidental historical and sociological details do not begin to

convey the extraordinary sensuousness of a young girl consumed kinetically by

love.

Rumor has it that Zhang Ziyi, the young lead in The Road Home and one of the co-stars in

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , has

replaced the glorious Gong Li in Mr. Yimou's affections. I can believe this

after watching how the middle portions of The

Road Home have been framed and edited so as to make Zhang Ziyi's character

the point-of-view determinant, no matter how limiting her vantage point may be

in processing information about the man she loves. Her future husband's point

of view, unlike hers, is never central to the narrative. When he disappears

into the city, he ceases to exist as a presence except for the sorrow on her

face. In the long history of the cinema around the world, there have been many

love letters written on the screen from directors to their actress-mistresses,

real and vicarious. But seldom if ever before has a love affair been wrapped

inside the rhetoric of a social document.

Hence Zhang Yimou's published statement about what The Road Home is really about: "This is

a film about love, about family and about the love between the members of a

family …. In the past, artists have tended to deal with this period in a rather

serious and analytic way, but I prefer to use more poetic and romantic methods

to tell this pure and simple love story. It was just this kind of true love which

enabled us to survive such difficult periods in our past. In the film, the

elements of history and present-day reality are both grounded in the notion of

study. At the same time, the story shows the attitude of country people towards

learning-essentially, an attitude of respect and veneration. All of this brings

to mind the ways that Chinese people have reacted to 'learning' at two

particular moments in our modern history. The first of these was several

decades ago. For purely political reasons, learning was cruelly devalued.

Intellectuals suffered physical abuse and were made to 'disappear.' The second

of these is today. Everyone now understands the principle that knowledge equals

power, and yet so many of us are ultra-materialistic and obsessed with money.

Learning is once again being devalued. I want to use this film to take a fresh

look at these fundamental issues in Chinese society and history."

The last thing I want to do is charge Mr. Yimou with bad

faith. Yet his statement seems derived from the platitudinous press conferences

at film festivals, where every film is reduced to a politically correct sermon.

To be sure, Mr. Yimou's film generates a powerful feeling of vindication for

the dead teacher when dozens of his former students materialize from nowhere to

carry his coffin to its final resting place. But we have seen very little of

what he has done as a teacher in his lifetime. The heart and emotional core of

the film rest in the love story recorded almost entirely on the ever-yearning

expressions of the romantic heroine, a Juliet whose Romeo is seen mostly from

afar. There is a metaphysical gravity, nonetheless, to the demonstration that

the young grow old and die-in this instance, after a life well-lived and

dedicated, at the end as in the beginning, to the common good. Still, Zhang

Ziyi is a knockout, though I doubt she will ever be capable of Gong Li's

stoical complexity.

He Pays but She Rules

Wayne Wang's The

Center of the World , from a screenplay by Ellen Benjamin Wong, based on a

story by Mr. Wang, Miranda July, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt, belongs to a

subgenre of the soft-core sex film in which the male calls all the shots and

the female is either willingly or unwillingly subjugated. Mr. Wang and his

several writing collaborators have pulled a major switch here by resisting the

sentimental temptation to redeem and purify a prostitute and her long-term john

in the happy and profitable manner of Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), with Julia Roberts as a Cinderella from the

gutter and Richard Gere as the Prince from the executive suite. The Center of the World is something

else again, though it begins in the traditional way with Peter Sarsgaard's

Richard Longman, a well-heeled computer whiz, picking up Molly Parker's

Florence, a nightclub stripper, and offering her a week's well-paid "vacation"

in a plush Vegas hotel. She imposes peculiarly restrictive ground rules:

separate rooms, no penetration and no kissing on the lips. Richard readily

agrees, and Florence embarks on a tantalizing program of intermediate

titillation.

From the outset, Richard is a less interesting character

than Florence: He spends his spare time obsessively playing video games that

reflect his more boring, cut-throat business activities, which have made him

financially successful but have left him emotionally immature. Florence does

not have to go so far as to become Richard's dominatrix, but she leaves no

doubt about which of them is in charge of the nighttime activities that begin

and end at the same hours every night. All his life, Richard has been terrified

of making a commitment to a woman, and now, in a strange way, a commitment is

being imposed upon him: He must be ready every night for Florence's skillful

caresses. The cumulative effect of this enforced discipline is to make him

think that he has fallen in love with Florence and is prepared to settle down

with her.

But here comes the switch: She will have none of it. As she

patiently explains to Richard, since he has paid for her services, she is a

whore, and that's all she wants to be. It is the way of the world for Richard

to have money and for Florence to need it, and her job is to build up his

desires until her artful final surrender, when she permits him to kiss her lips

and penetrate her. It is all part of Florence's erotic extravaganza, and there

is no extra charge. Richard is bereft for a time, but he finally reconciles

himself to his role and hers and wants everything to continue on the same

terms.

Ms. Parker gives a remarkable performance on all cylinders,

and her character emerges as neither a tease nor a slut, but as a curiously

rational and self-possessed creature of her time and place. She can always draw

the line between what she will do and what she will not-yet a brief interlude

with Jerri (Carla Gugino), a Vegas-showgirl friend, suggests that Florence is

not entirely a stranger to same-sex hanky-panky. But the most stunning scene of

all is one in which Florence starts out with absolutely no makeup and proceeds,

in one take, to transform herself from an unadorned female to a professional

temptress. It is one of the most striking demonstrations I have ever seen on

the screen of sex as theater.