In “The Flowers of War,’’ when a lone Chinese sniper blows up himself and a pack of Japanese soldiers, the blast sends dust, debris, and fabric flying through the air. It’s not that you notice the colors of the fabric - they’re like fireworks. It’s that you notice that you’ve noticed. The comely images in this movie - and there are many of them - call attention to themselves, as do most of the images in most movies by Zhang Yimou, - from “Ju Dou’’ to “The House of Flying Daggers.’’ The idea here is to foster visual irony. The film is set during World War II not long after the Japanese have devastated the former Chinese capital, Nanking, in 1937 and ’38. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were murdered, and Japanese battalions stuck around to pick from the massacre’s bones. In many cases, that involved raping girls, young women, and men.
‘Flowers of War’ blooms with jarring, beautiful colors
Movie Review
Zhang’s irony arises from some contrast between vibrancy and death. Zhang loves life too much to let it pass without a flourish or some grandeur. Here that commitment to zest and the color wheel seems increasingly, unconsciously futile. The movie focuses on a group of Catholic-school girls, holed up in a church, along with the band of Chinese prostitutes that lets itself in for shelter. The girls’ priest has died, but in his place wanders an American mortician, a hairy and charming alcoholic played by Christian Bale. He arrives just in time to protect the girls from the Japanese marauders intent on violating them. He does so by posing, for the girls and the Japanese, as a priest.
The movie is based on a novel by Geling Yan, “The Thirteen Flowers of War,’’ whose title suggests the number of girls left in the orphanage, the number that the Japanese expect delivered to their quarters to perform a hymn. And the central tension amounts to how to save the girls from the Japanese, because everybody - the girls, the prostitutes, the American - knows the Japanese don’t really want to hear anyone sing.