Starring: Christian Bale, Ni Ni, Zhang Xinyi, Huang Tianyuan
Director: Zhang Yimou
Category: IIB (English, Putonghua, Japanese and Nanjing Chinese)
One of cinema's most brilliant artists commits a celluloid atrocity in The Flowers of War, a technically accomplished but thoroughly repugnant dramatisation of Japan's brutal invasion of Nanjing in December 1937.
'The Rape of Nanking' has proved fodder for numerous motion pictures, most recently Lu Chuan's creditable City of Life and Death (2009).
In taking on the subject, Zhang Yimou has given it a pictorial flourish befitting the most gargantuan budget in Chinese movie history, and an unprecedented focus on the international market by placing Oscar-winning Christian Bale at its centre.
The script by Liu Heng is bereft of emotional nuance and out-of-synch with the spirit of its milieu, going instead for broad sentimental strokes, stereotypical portrayals, and a generic view of wartime depravity. Not that the picture stints on displays of violence and cruelty, but does so in such a way that turns these into obvious devices with little resonance beyond the confines of the silver screen.
This is in large part emphasised by the preposterousness of the saga's core character: John Miller (Christian Bale) is a hard-drinking, hard-living American mortician incongruously resident in China - not that we ever learn a thing about his background - whom the war unconvincingly transforms into a saint. Bale is all over the place in his over-the-top impersonation.