A Flowering Promise

Flowers of War (Zhang Yimou)

An American embalmer comes to bury a priest in Nanjing. Trouble is, it’s 1937 and the city is under attack by the Japanese. The American gets involved with the chaste church girls and a group of prostitutes who have sought refuge in the church. In the end, the embalmer puts his cosmetic skills to good use to save the church girls when they are commanded to attend a military celebration. He makes the prostitutes up to look like the church girls and off they go to what is almost certainly going to be an orgy of sex and death with a Japanese army battalion.

Much maligned, especially in its conjunction of sex and holocaust of the rape of Nanjing, Zhang’s Flowers of War has as much to do with that tragic episode in Sino-Japanese relations as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia had to do with the British flirtation with the Arab National Council during the First World War. Which is to say that historical catastrophe in cinema is seen as just cause for a love story. In Lean’s case it was a case of O’Toole’s (was a screen name ever so apropos) passion for Arabica and in particular men. But Zhang is no David Lean – he just cannot manage the transition from the rural intimacy of individual struggle (cf. The Story of Qiu Jiu) to a a more sweeping historical embrace. Qiu Jiu is a Rohmerian peasant who is relentless in her pursuit of bureaucrats, while Zhang Ziyi in House of Flying Daggers is some kind of whatever-dynasty pole dancer turned on by drum vibrations. His view of women turns on a gimmick, which is often underpinned by self-determination. Intriguing as this may be as a premise for a movie, it’s still not the incisive critique – sexual or otherwise – of imperial dreams that lie at the base of any worthy historical epic.

Actually Zhang is lucky – as China’s answer to David Lean, he would go down in the homosexual glory that is both Lawrence and Doc Zhivago. And Zhang is neither – by which I mean gay, or a literary filmmaker. Watching Flowers of War I was struck instead by his genius for the rambunctious and the faux-macho which means that he is emerging surprisingly, as Chinese cinema’s answer to Raoul Walsh.

Flowers of War is a great film – not in the way that its maker intended it but as a rupture of a filmmaker’s career and view of life. It has the devil-may-care approach to women that one finds in Walsh’s A King and Four Queens – the title says it all for it is a gamble not only with women but what they represent, which is life itself.

There is a Hawksian sentiment to Flowers of War in the presentation of Christian Bale as a drunk (embalmer) who in the Hollywood course of the film is redeemed not only by his life-saving good work (clearly an irony given his profession) but also by his passage to sobriety. This trajectory closely follows Dean Martin in Hawks’ Rio Bravo – a drunk who redeems himself by restoring order in the town that originally despised him. It’s marked by his physical appearance – from bearded loser to well-shaven professional – in the same way that Deano moves from drunk to crooner (though in real life he played on a conjunction of the two).

This passage of the American – as presented in a Chinese film set during the hegemony of Japanese imperialism – is as loaded as it gets, mainly because it relates to the contemporary situation. And like any great Walsh (as opposed to Hawks) film, it’s because the attitude towards women protagonists is at first simple but then very complex. For Hawks, women were guileless, they reflected the repressed trickiness of men. For Walsh, women were the bravado side of men, the “closers” in any deal. Look at one of Walsh’s finest films, Colorado Territory, where Virginia Mayo gives not only one of her greatest screen performances, but also one of the most manly performances in order to lay down the law.

Zhang has not yet reached that apotheosis – he stills see women as subordinate to men in social terms but superior in narrative plot strategies. He cannot yet conjoin the two because the dialectic still needs some syncretisation. But one expects that, like China itself,  it is only a matter of time.