Hi! Welcome to The Silver Spleen.
My name is Eleanor Roosevelt and this is my review of
The Flowers of War.
During thefall of Nanjing in 1937,
a group of convent school girls take refuge in a church.
So do a group of prostitutes,
and a Western mortician played by Christian Bale.
The Japanese know that the convent girls are there,
and they want to do terrible things to these girls
The mortician tries to stop them.
When the Flowers of War was released in 2011,
I didn't watch it in the cinema.
I picked it up recently on DVD and finally watched it.
Zhang Yimou directed Flowers of War,
which is based on a novella written by Yang Geling.
The novella was inspired by the experiences of Minnie Vautrin,
a Christian missionary in China
during the early part of World War Two.
The story is told through the eyes of Shu,
a schoolgirl played by Zhang Xinyi,
in what was apparently her first film role.
She, like the entire cast, does a really admirable job in the movie.
She's believable, watchable, and engaging.
I wouldn't say she was entertaining,
but just 'cause... it's not that kind of movie,
so I wouldn't say that, but she's really good.
Christian Bale... is kind of entertaining in his role,
bringing a number of layers to his character
that evolve over the course of the narrative.
Whatever you might think about him personally,
he's a hell of an actor,
and here he makes a secondary character
an integral but unobtrusive part of the story.
Ni Ni plays Yu Mo,
the unofficial leader of the
"horizontal refreshment workers"
who take refuge in the basement of the church
This was also apparently her first film role,
and she's just as great as everyone else,
The hard part with any movie role worth watching
is managing nuance and tonal shifts.
It's very difficult to be both believable and engaging.
Depending on the characters, or the story,
that can be even more difficult.
It would have been easy for The Flowers of War
to have reflexively fallen back on the
cartoonish approach to World War II
and Japanese soldiers taken by movies like Ip Man.
Instead, and probably because it's Zhang Yimou,
there's nothing emotionally simple about the story
or the portrayals of the Japanese.
Don't get me wrong,
they are awful human beings in this movie,
but sometimes you can make people even more terrible
by occasionally making them nice at first.
It also makes for a more nuanced and effective story arc.
Every time this subject comes up in a review,
I try to make a disclaimer and yet some butthurt wumao
will still spray 'word diarrhea' all over the comments section.
I know the Japanese did terrible things in World War II,
I'm not objecting to movies that say that.
I object to movies that do it
in simplistic and cartoonish ways, okay?
I know that won't help but, at least I said it.
By the end of the movie,
the story has presented you with a profoundly sad set of events
that are, if not historical fact,
still very affecting.
The credit for that goes to the director and the cast,
all of whom turned in very
commendable and memorable performances.
The Flowers of War manages somehow to be...
a war movie, and a character study, and a lot more.
It's entertaining, but it's also thought-provoking,
and it's a very interesting movie for a lot of reasons.
Now, like I said, I avoided this movie
five years ago when it hit cinemas,
but that's probably Donnie yen's fault.
I'm glad that I watched it and it is a really good movie,
and I was very pleasantly surprised
by the emotional complexity of the film,
because that's not always the case.
And so I would encourage you to watch this film,
but of course I'm going to encourage you to do it
by paying for the privilege.
It doesn't have to be a lot of money.
I got this for, I don' know, 3/HK$100.
It's like 4 bucks. Come on you can cough up US$4!
In the description I'll add a link where you can
find a copy on blu-ray or DVD- (DVD probably...)
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If you didn't please let me know.
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Thanks for watching, I'll see you again soon.