Review of City of Life and Death (2009) by Ling E — 05 Apr 2010

Wholly unsentimentalised, devastating account of the sorriest chapter in Sino-Japanese relations... As a combat movie, this is evidently less about linear narrative or sustained, consistent niceties of characterisation - though Chuan is attentive to agonised, deranged, numbed and uncomprehending faces - than about allowing audiences to witness with their own eyes what it must have been like to exist in a location where 300,000 people died in a matter of weeks.

There's something about the way the film jettisons conventional storytelling more or less completely - handwritten postcards meant to provide context appear on screen barely long enough to be scanned - that, coupled with the boldness of Chuan's imagemaking, sometimes gives "City of Life and Death" the air of a trailer for a war opus, highlighting the worst - and thus most striking - atrocities.

In fact, the substance that would ordinarily be missing from trailers is all there in the sheer, overwhelming accumulation of detail, the way Chuan's camera scans each grim tableau to locate the tiny, everyday dramas that decided who survived Nanking and who didn't.

A woman's naked corpse sits, oddly pristine, in the rubble; patients in a hospital ward choose to shoot themselves as the Japanese arrives; hordes of extras are mown down like dominoes, their heads severed and left to swing from tree branches.

It's not a history lesson so much as a dolorous, often chilling testimony; a parade of horrors couched in terms of the utmost sincerity and sobriety. You could tell yourself "it's only a movie", were you not so convinced this actually happened.