Photo: Baidu.com

Jue Chuan is one of the most radiant stars of the latest Lu Chuan film, ‘Nanjing! Nanjing!’ and the film is based around his experiences in Nanjing around the time of the Japanese invasion of the south Chinese city. For a film that deals with one of the great massacres of Chinese history, that portraits such damage done to China and deals with such a sensitive period of Chinese history, coming face to face with an invader doubtless requires lots of reasoning and guts.

In the last few years, thinkers have been talking about who’s at fault for the starting of the war and war crimes, at leisure commenting on whether it was just or unjust. Even if we don’t consider new cultural changes, the pieces that are made about WW2 can be split into the two camps of justifiable and unjustifiable. This has made for more emotionally charged, true to life and varied films.

‘Nanjing! Nanjing!’ has also taken on an added air of realism, making the story less about dry history and more about something that is happening now. This posses the question of how young Chinese people should treat the older generation that experienced these huge injuries? And how should young Japanese people treat their older generation who inflicted this on others?

It is in the light of this that Jue Chuan masterfully leads those of the audience, both those connected and those unconnected to the events in the film, to the core of the story, to his soul and to know what he saw, felt and feared during that period in time. He set free a Chinese ‘comfort woman’ (sex slave) Xiao Jiang but he didn’t dare, or maybe was unable to make his comrades release her. He also knew that Mr. Jiang had repeatedly faked his relatives into the refugee camps unspotted, and he didn’t dare or perhaps was unable to stop his comrades exposing Jiang’s acts. When Jiang was carried off he betrayed himself as helping the enemy and fired a gun at Jiang. He understood her, so he tired to help her escape cleanly in death.

Since the start of the war, Jue Chuan had had his doubts. It wasn’t what he wanted, it wasn’t what anyone wanted and he carried that haze of doubt around with him all the time up to when he pointed the gun to his temple. He committed suicide because of the shame he felt for not only harming his country, but also destroying people on both the Chinese and Japanese side, both men and women.

‘Nanjing! Nanjing!’ has the confidence to face the critics and provoke argument, and is about the human experience, not merely about nationalism. This is not just another violent war flick, but more a search for the truth for China and the rest of the world.

Photo: Baidu.com

At the end of the film it reminds us that the people who fought against the Japanese were 22, 24, 28, 30 years old. Those people were all the age we are now, so it begs the question, how would we act in that situation? Would you be like Xiao Jiang, who meekly entered the Japanese Comfort Camps, but then selflessly exchanged her services so that other Chinese could be given food and fuel. She might have been a hooker, but she was the most soul-stirring hooker you’ve ever seen.

Hasn’t there been enough about the Nanjing massacre already? But what we’ve been missing before is the personal side to the story, due to the fact that in the past the story has just been abused so much. A Greek rock singer whose family died in Auschwitz wrote a song about the Holocaust that so many young Israelis sing to help them understand it, just as Lu Chuan is trying to do with this latest film.

All in all, go to the cinema and check this film out, you might just be in for a slightly different cinematic experience than you first imagined.

See this blog in its full and original form at Lu Chuan’s Blog

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