In The Flowers of War, filmmaker Zhang Yimou presents the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937 through the point of view of Chinese Catholic schoolgirl Shujuan (Xinyi Zhang). The rape of Nanking coincides with the development of Shujuan’s sexual identity as a woman, an experience that colors her memories of national trauma.
To dramatize this, Zhang and screenwriter Heng Liu (working from Geling Yan’s novel) put the innocent female students into relief with the prostitutes who also take shelter in a Catholic church in Nanking. Doing so contrasts those for whom sex is a mystery—the discovery of which will be perverted by war—with those who command the commercialized codes of female sexuality. Through their common exploitation, Zhang reveals a shared spiritual essence. “We’re all orphans!” one of the prostitutes declares.
Zhang signifies this existential-spiritual condition through Shujuan’s stained-glass perspective. She first sees the prostitutes approaching the church through the prismatic rainbow of the church’s decorative window. This memory haunts her life and her perception of femininity (the moment is even later reconceived as a musical number). The polychromatic light that beams through the window are the same hues as the dress that clings to the body of the prostitute’s leader Yu Mo (the riveting Ni Ni, who masters movie star codification).
The war enters Shujuan’s consciousness as bullets shatter panes of glass—symbolizing pitiless death, male aggression or patriotic sacrifice. Throughout the film, the shard-like precision of Zhang’s editing turns shocking violence into slow-motion splashes of red. However, the window’s abstract (rather than iconic or narrative) design denies the film’s ecclesiastical potential. Consequently, the story’s climactic sacrifice does not illuminate Christian faith or Catholic ritual.
The film’s richest intertextual association is in the presence of Christian Bale, as a lapsed Catholic mortician—he’s an “orphan” too—who finds redemption impersonating a priest to protect the girls and women at the church. Zhang casts Bale to signal a return to the humanist tradition represented by Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), which presented the Japanese occupation through the eyes of Bale as a boy. After pop cinema’s 25-year decline into the Dark Knight of nihilism, Zhang restores Bale’s benevolent significance by perceiving his mystery through the eyes of Shujuan.
The stained-glass melodrama of The Flowers of War emphasizes Zhang’s feeling for color (the sublime impulse) and women (the humanist impulse). Thus the emotions of the film engender humanist compassion rather than Catholic revelation—the empathic challenge to modern China’s anti-Catholic repression. Zhang is a great filmmaker who revolutionized globalist pop cinema potential with Hero (2004), Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) and A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop (2010). Here he settles for mere (exquisitely rendered) progress.
John Demetry articulates and contextualizes the achievement of Zhang Yimou’s Hero in his book The Community of Desire: Selected Critical Writings (2001-2007) available at www.lulu.com.
