The Flowers of War (2011)

  I'm not going to lie, this movie fucked me up.  It kicked the everloving shit out of me.  It's so good but it's so painful I don't know that it's worth it.

In 1937, Japanese forces invaded and took control of the Chinese city of Nanking.  A group of Catholic schoolgirls and a group of high-priced prostitutes both take refuge in a cathedral that has been kept free of most fighting, thanks to the presence of a Western priest.  The priest has died, however, and the mortician charged with his burial (Christian Bale) is the only white guy left.  Both groups of women know that they need him to have any chance at escape but with a Japanese commander (Atsuro Watabe) aware of the schoolgirls, such a chance is very slim.

The history of non-combatants in an occupied zone is almost never a pleasant tale.  Tensions run high at the best of times and at worst, you get war crimes of unspeakable depravity.  Considering that this is commonly referred to as "The Massacre of Nanking" or "The Rape of Nanking", you can guess on which end of the scale it falls.  I'm deliberately being glib because if I think about it too much I'll get all sad again.  But it should be sad.  We should look on these events with a collective horror and they should lurk in the back of our minds as a warning of what we are capable of doing to the most defenseless.

I'M NOT CRYING, YOU'RE CRYING.

I feel like I've just had a whole post dedicated to Zhang Yimou's unerring eye for color.  This film is so incredibly beautiful just visually that it makes the moments of horror stand out all the more.  And he doesn't shy away from the visceral, more than willing to leave the camera on a stark detail.  Like seeing something traumatic in real life.  Your brain can't encompass all of the scene so it just takes little bits at a time, focusing on a trivial detail while it struggles to cope with the enormity of the wrongness.

Actresses Ni Ni and Zhang Xinyi channel heartbreaking strength and fear and Christian Bale is always fantastic but he reaches such depths of compassion here.  I am shocked this didn't get an Oscar nomination, to be honest.  I really think it was overlooked unfairly.

I do recommend this.  It's too good not to, but for the love of Jesus, have something happy to watch afterwards.