Spanning only a few months, from the attack by Japanese forces in late 1937 to the "formal" declaration of victory a few months later in 1938, City of Life and Death is a stark, grueling film: shot in black and white, short on dialogue, long on the atmosphere of chaos and terror, rich in detail and harrowing observations of life in a war culture where civilians are treated as inconveniences at best and spoils of war at worst. The passing of time and the marking of major events comes through letters and postcards. The focus isn't on the big events of historical importance but on the day-to-day ordeal of the people within the walls and director Lu Chuan (Kekexili: Mountain Patrol) finds evocative and affecting details to suggest the greater canvas with small, personal illustrations. The scale and scope of the film is epic but the film focuses on the human details.
City of Life and Death is not a tale of survival. It is a fictionalized recreation of the historical record that dramatizes the real-life stories of people caught in the worst atrocity in the run up to World War II. The most famous of those people was John Rabe, a businessman who chose to remain in the occupied city and organize and enforce a safety zone for the Chinese civilians trapped in the city by the occupation. What makes him such a fascinating true story is that he was a German Nazi who defied the command of Germany's (then) unofficial allies and, eventually, his own government until he was eventually ordered to return home. Other films have focused on his role and the parts played by other Europeans in the city -- the documentary Nanjing (2007), German production John Rabe (2009) and (in echoes and references) the American production The Children of Huang Shi (2008) -- but here (played by John Paisley) he is simply one of many stories of civilians and soldiers. City of Life and Death is from China and it puts the Chinese experience front and center, from soldiers to civilians. Rabe's Chinese assistant (comedian Fan Wei) becomes a reluctant leader in the safety zone, knowing that their precarious safety is only as strong as the Europeans who stand with them. A teacher (Gao Yuanyuan) puts herself directly between the Japanese soldiers and the young women they come to force into their brothels, a moral act with terrible consequences when Rabe is called back to Germany. Lu Chuan presents the scenes without melodrama, giving the events both a documentary immediacy and a human dimension as he observes the helplessness of the victims and the terror of an ordeal where survival is precarious and justice is capricious.
The most harrowing ordeal in the film is the brutal, systematic and in often sadistic execution of thousands of Chinese soldiers. There are mass machine-gun firing squads. Men are bayoneted to death, burned alive, marched into the ocean to drown, buried alive. Severed heads hang from ropes like ghoulish ornaments. The scale of the slaughter is almost unimaginable. One of director Lu Chuan's great triumphs is to suggest the enormity of the scale with a hard, meticulous clarity. Within weeks of the fall of Nanjing every soldier was executed, over 200,000 men. City of Life and Death puts a convincing image to the abstract history.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the historical record, the Japanese government still officially denies that atrocities occurred, let alone an act of such barbarism, and the film was criticized by the Japanese. More surprising is the criticism from some Chinese quarters for its sympathetic treatment of one (one!) Japanese soldier: Sgt. Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), a young scholar who is appalled at the behavior of his army. While it hardly humanizes the Japanese forces, it does remind us that the army was made up of human beings, not war movie caricatures. City of Life and Death doesn't attempt to understand the attitude of racial and cultural superiority of the Japanese or of the unforgiving warrior ethic that treats a defeated enemy as undeserving of respect, but that attitude is present in the behavior of the officers and the soldiers. The actions are monstrous, but the men are still just men. Seventy years later, this terrible event is still a raw wound for both countries. Denial only prolongs the pain. City of Life and Death is an honest and earnest attempt to confront the history and a powerful recreation of the human side of the story.
Kino Classics releases the film on both DVD and Blu-ray and the image is superb. Black and white can be more unforgiving than color on HD but the clarity of the Blu-ray is superb. Both versions are presented in two-disc editions, with the feature-length making-of documentary Matters of Life and Death: The Making of City of Life and Death on the second disc (DVD only). The production, shot on digital video and presented in Academy Ratio (1.33:1), is almost as long as the film, and offers a detailed look at production with behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the director and members of the cast and crew. Like the film, it is in Mandarin with English subtitles.
For more information about City of Life and Death, visit Kino Lorber.
by Sean Axmaker
