It’s interesting to contrast City of Life and Death (南京! 南京!) with older Chinese films about the war. Other reviewers have already pointed out how humanized the Japanese characters are, and it’s certainly a far cry from the buck-toothed cartoon villains they’re portrayed as in early propaganda films such as 1965’s Tunnel Warfare (地道戰). On the other hand, Chinese films today can get away with much more in terms of graphic violence and sexual content than ever before, as a result of relaxed censorship by the SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television). Consequently, the Japanese troops are actually far more brutal in this film than in most previous films on this subject, simply because more is shown, and what is shown is more realistic and unflinching.

The fact that actual professional Japanese actors (good ones, no less) were cast for this film to play the Japanese characters, and that those characters are more nuanced than in most mainstream Chinese films, represents a huge step forward. Yet, there’s still a scene where a Japanese officer throws a kid out the window. It made me think of Erich von Stroheim playing a Hun(!) in The Heart of Humanity (1919), though I’ve only read about that. So, uh, still some room for improvement.

City of Life and Death takes a lot of its cues from Hollywood WWII films, in particular Saving Private Ryan (in early battle scenes) and Schindler’s List (in the way tragedy and inhumanity are depicted, and in the choice to film in black and white). But if certain scenes seem overly broad or melodramatic to Western viewers, even in light of the Spielbergian influence, I’d wager it’s because City of Life and Death is actually a sort of hybrid of the Hollywood Oscar-bait Holocaust film, and of the Chinese “main melody” film. You can think of main melody films as films whose values and moral messages happen to match current government policies and propaganda narratives. City of Life and Death is a sort of semi-official main melody film, and it is the most accomplished example of that genre I’ve seen. At a purely technical level, it rivals anything from Hollywood, and the black and white cinematography is unbelievably good.

As a Chinese person myself, this film makes me optimistic about the prospects of commercial Chinese cinema in the global market. If a Western studio had told this story, it would have been told as the usual, self-congratulatory “heroic white people save poor helpless locals from the evil military regime” narrative (just look at the German film John Rabe, or the American film Nanking, for instance). It’s always nice when the locals finally get a big enough budget to tell their own damn stories for a change. On the other hand, the propaganda elements make me uneasy, and give me a feeling of being emotionally manipulated. If we take the documentary Nanking to be an American view of the story, then City of Life and Death seems to simply trade Nanking’s Hollywood tropes for Chinese ones (although it does make the American film look half-assed and lightweight by comparison). The story of Nanjing is certainly one that needs to be told, but I have a feeling we’ll soon be saturated with heavy-handed Chinese films about it in much the same way that Hollywood keeps remaking Schindler’s List over and over again. For better or worse, this movie may be a sign of things to come.