Despite having a huge budget, global aspirations and Christian Bale, the harrowing Chinese film The Flowers of War bombed in the US. Will the setback deter China's ambitious film-makers?
Few could question Zhang Yimou's ambition. In the 1980s and 1990s, he won acclaim with the likes of Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. In the 2000s, he stormed to global box-office success with Hero. Though Danny Boyle's Olympics opener is now fresher in the mind, Zhang's spectacular staging of the Beijing opening ceremony four years ago left a lasting impression of Chinese capability that any of history's greatest propagandists would have envied. It also signified that Zhang, who hailed from a family with a Chinese nationalist past and was once seen as a subversive film-maker, had been welcomed into the fold of official Communist party approval.
Zhang's latest production, The Flowers of War, hits British cinemas Friday – and aims even higher. This epic tale of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 had a budget of $100m, stars a western A-lister, and has almost half its dialogue in English. No Chinese film has ever pitched harder for the mainstream global audience Hollywood takes for granted. No Chinese film has failed harder, either.
Despite the big money, Christian Bale and a lavishly funded public-relations campaign, The Flowers of War flopped on US release. Critics were not kind: it was too long, too melodramatic, too lightweight. Bale was obliged to deny that it was a propaganda movie: funding had been provided by the Chinese government and state-backed banks. It was deemed nowhere near as good as City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan's unflinching 2009 take on the same subject. Flowers of War was China's chosen candidate for the best foreign language category at the Oscars, but no nomination was forthcoming – though it did get a nod from the Golden Globes. Audience figures were dismal. In 2004, Zhang's Hero hit No 1 at the US box office, eventually grossing $54m. Flowers of War took just $311,000.
The film is set in Nanjing, then the capital of China, in December 1937, just as invading Japanese soldiers take control. Bale plays a fictional dissolute mortician who must act like a priest to defend a Catholic church in which both a group of convent girls and a group of prostitutes shelter from the horrors outside.
Over the winter of 1937, Japanese troops in Nanjing unleashed a relentless onslaught of looting, burning, torture and murder. But the most infamous crime they committed was rape – for which the episode is sometimes called the Rape of Nanjing. At least 20,000 women and girls were raped, as well as an unknown number of boys. Men were disembowelled, roasted on wires over open fires, or sprayed with industrial acid. Japanese soldiers engaged in contests to slay the most Chinese with their swords, and gloated over reaching 100 kills. Estimates of the death toll reached 260,000 to 350,000. This is not exactly a feelgood subject.
"Zhang Yimou and [producer] Zhang Weiping talked about this as China's holocaust film," says Jonathan Landreth, a journalist based in Beijing. "It is a subject which raises incredible nationalistic feelings across the generations in China. Zhang Yimou was a made man in the Chinese film industry, especially after the Olympics. He was tapped by the powers that be to make a film that would travel. The government, from the highest level down, has said for the last few years that is it very important to use all media to promote the country's image."
According to a diplomatic cable from 2007 released by Wikileaks, vice-president Xi Jinping, the man expected to become China's next leader, admires what he called Hollywood's "grand and truthful" films. He mentioned Saving Private Ryan and The Departed. This February, Xi travelled to Hollywood in person to preside over agreements on closer co-operation between the American and Chinese film industries. "It's not hard to see what the international aspirations of this film were," says Landreth, "but it fell flat on its face in the US."
"Who knows why it didn't work?" says Justin Chang, senior film critic at Variety. "If it didn't connect, if it was perhaps too violent? It could be that they just didn't market it effectively, and Asian films are generally a hard sell for western audiences to begin with." Perhaps so, for Flowers of War is not a bad film. It is beautifully shot, affecting despite its contrived storyline, and filled with fine performances by a largely young and unknown cast. But it does not fit into either of the boxes into which Chinese films are expected to fit in the west, namely "martial arts" or "arthouse". It has the production values, the schmaltz and even the strongly stated Christian values of a big Hollywood picture – but it's Chinese. "Most US audiences don't watch films in other languages, period," says Landreth. Flowers of War may be almost half in English, but it's more than half in Mandarin. Over a runtime of nearly two and a half hours, that means there are still a lot of subtitles to read.
The role and the performance that most divide critics is Christian Bale's. As a child actor, Bale starred in another film about the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45: Empire of the Sun. Like almost all western movies about Asia and Africa, it focused on a white character. A white character, according to western film-making tradition, provides a way into a foreign subject for mostly white western audiences– who, it is presumed, would otherwise have no interest.
Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, expressed dismay that Flowers of War tried this same trick: "Was any consideration given to the possibility of a Chinese priest? Would that be asking for too much?" In the context of Chinese film, though, Zhang's casting of an American star does not signify an apology for telling a Chinese story. On the contrary, it makes the loud demand that the west must pay attention to, and care about, this piece of Chinese history. The film's fictional mortician has a factual inspiration: 27 westerners were in Nanjing when it fell to the Japanese, many exhibiting extreme bravery. Casting Bale, one of Hollywood's most sought-after stars, is also a striking assertion of the Chinese film industry's aspiration for equal status with its American competitors.
Bale's casting did, though, require some explanation in China. When the film was announced, Jonathan Landreth attended Zhang Yimou's press conference in Beijing. A montage of visual effects was shown, starting with a giant image of Leonardo DiCaprio. "I already knew that Bale was to be cast, but few people in China at that time knew that he's Batman – you don't often see his face because of the mask," Landreth says. "Leo, on the other hand, is super famous, because of Titanic. So they superimposed Bale's face over DiCaprio's, to show that he was going to be even bigger. The next day, the Chinese press was full of stories about Bale being just as big as DiCaprio."
Flowers of War was a hit in China, where it appears almost to have made back its $100m. But the fact that it bombed in the US is unlikely to put Chinese producers – or the Chinese government – off trying again. "I don't think this will be the last time you'll see prominent western actors and filmmakers involved in Asian productions," says Justin Chang.
Last year, Kevin Spacey also starred in a part-English, part-Mandarin Chinese film: Dayyan Eng's Inseparable. Moving the other way, Jackie Chan and Jet Li are fully fledged crossover stars; Chan appearing recently in a Chinese-American co-production, 2010's Karate Kid, alongside Will Smith's son Jaden. Smith has declared himself keen to work with another major Asian star, Bollywood's Aishwarya Rai. Despite India's linguistic advantage over China – English is widely spoken – its various film industries tend to focus their overseas marketing on the Indian diaspora, and have not yet made a direct play for western audiences on the level of Flowers of War. Even so, booming budgets have lured a few Americans east. Sylvester Stallone had a cameo in 2009's Kambakkht Ishq. Snoop Dogg popped up in 2008's Singh is Kinng, in whose title track he fearlessly claimed to "Represent the Punjabi". It is faint praise to note that Bale's appearance in Flowers of War is a good deal more credible than either of those Bollywood moments, but it is. The very fact of how much more credible it is makes Zhang Yimou's and Xi Jinping's western ambitions look like they might not be that far from fulfillment after all. It may simply be a question of getting the formula right.
For anyone interested in the future of film, Zhang Yimou's movie is well worth seeing. It may be more interesting for what it says about the Chinese film industry than the Nanjing massacre, but what it says about the Chinese film industry is remarkable. "Everyone and their grandmother is trying to figure out how to make a movie that will play to both audiences," says Landreth. For now, Hollywood holds that territory – but all empires fall, if they do not adapt swiftly and radically to changing circumstances. With the global film industry in China's sights, it may not be long until mainstream English-speaking audiences have a good reason to start reading those subtitles.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/02/flowers-of-war-chinese-film
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