Review of City of Life and Death (2009) by Jean-Francois V — 09 Jun 2012

"City of Life and Death" gives that other crime against humanity, the Rape of Nanking, the same treatment as the holocaust received in Spielberg's "Schindler's List": a harrowing, black and white depiction of sheer horror barely counterbalanced by heroic acts of virtue.

The film is quite powerful, though the first part looks a little too much like a U.S. action movie, with CGI, gunfights and explosions galore.

I also am a bit unsure about the legitimacy of turning such horrible events into dramas, rather than documentaries. Even trying to know about these things can destroy your sanity: American historian Iris Chang, for instance, fell into depression and committed suicide after researching the massacre. According to Wikipedia, she was "deeply disturbed by much of the subject matter of her research. Her work in Nanjing left her physically weak.".

Despite quite impressive crowd scenes, the film also fails to give an idea of the true scale of the slaughter, in which 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. And because it (thankfully) tries to retain some decency, never going further than showing naked bodies and depicting gang rape from a distance, it also fail to capture the truly satanic nature of the sexual sadism that was perpetrated on Chinese women and girls (I found looking at the pictures on Wikipedia more revolting and traumatising than anything shown in the film.).

There are some horrors we need to know about in a very abstract way if we do not want to be psychologically destroyed by them, and the Japanese atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s are definitely among them.