【世界看南京】《南京南京》海外影评汇总

LA Times -- (洛杉矶时报)
by Betsy Sharkey （1）
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/awards/2009/09/of-men-and-children-and-war.html
If there is nothing else to know about war, after so many that have marched along for generations on end, it is that the weapons may change, but the brutality and inhumanity do not. I've been reminded of that by two exceptional filmmakers at the Toronto Film Festival, each with powerful stories that couldn't be more different in their texture, tone, story-telling and cinematic style... and yet the human machinations, where no action is insignificant, echo each other again and again. 

Betsy　Sharkey　(2) (洛杉矶时报)
I'll start with Chinese writer/director Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death" about the Nanking massacre by the Japanese army in the second World War. By the time the story begins, the city has been taken but for a few skirmishes here and there. The remaining fights are some of the most affectingly choreographed battle scenes to be found, with Chuan a master at moving from the micro of a face to the macro of a city in ruins.
Chuan follows both the occupiers and the captives with equal sensitivity, for there are victims and villains on both sides, as the Japanese soldiers, some barely men, soon find that there is little justice in power. The film unfolds like a novel with chapters that are each book-ended by the acceptance of death, the price of living. The sadness of that structure is only that at each stage there is the loss of characters you've come to love. Truly a masterpiece in black and white and pain and bound to be among the foreign films that will be headed to the Academy Awards.
2009.09.12

The different stories necessitate some degree of skipping from thread to thread, with major sequences bookended by title cards in the form of postcards from the city. The first stretch is almost deceptively low-key. The opening scenes can be confusing to anyone not schooled in the period and even when the film finds its rhythm there is a feeling of familiarity. An early battle sequence is terrifically directed (comfortably eclipsing "The Assembly") yet can’t help but reinforce the impression this is safe ground.
And then the action winds down (it is in fact the only such sequence), and the film transitions brilliantly, terrifyingly, into the real meat of the narrative. So much public outrage over the legitimacy of modern military conflict centers on the legality of either side’s actions, the assumption that thousands of heavily armed men are going to behave themselves around defenseless non-combatants because this is the only human thing to do. Nanking, like Bosnia or Rwanda after it, entertained no such niceties. The foreign nationals who established the Safety Zone had to plead their case to the occupying Japanese forces day by day, which still did not stop troops from breaking in on a whim to carry off more victims, many of whom never returned. Outside the Zone was hell, by all accounts, with John Rabe and his compatriots able to do little other than document the atrocities.
City of Life and Death’s depiction of these terrifying weeks features some of the most harrowing images ever committed to film. While rarely explicit – this is far from the exploitation cinema of "Men Behind The Sun" and its ilk – the film hammers home that from this point onwards, all bets are definitely off. The massacres, with thousands of helpless Chinese machine-gunned on an industrial scale, are genuinely shocking for all their relative lack of gore. Even the more character-driven, quieter moments can still reinforce the creeping realization no-one is safe; a later sequence with women volunteering to sacrifice themselves into prostitution for the Japanese soldiers, or the aftermath of Rabe’s eventual departure from the city in the final reels, are so emotionally draining as to border on unwatchable.


Yet for all this the film never judges, never resorts to didactic life lessons or swelling strings in the background. There is plenty for the Communist regime to approve of – the main Japanese viewpoint is an obvious cry of “What have we done?” – but City… is a world away from the poisonous caricatures of, say, "Ip Man". Lu Chuan switches from the massacres to the mundane (scenes of the Japanese troops relaxing as they practice for the ceremony to mark their occupation of the city) and does this with a calm assurance that puts the viewer in mind of Bong Joon-Ho ("Memories of Murder", "The Host"); few directors today can manage to temper absolute horror with such wry black humor.
The film is noticeably short of perfect. The pacing in the opening sequence can seem somewhat intimidating, with some background left unexplained and the title cards difficult to read. Though the sets are rarely less than stunning – the opening battle sequence uses the blasted cityscape to tremendous visual and dynamic effect – the monochrome cinematography is a little too drab and would have benefited from a sharper color palette with clearer blacks and markedly less grey. The acting hits some unbelievable high notes, particularly from Liu Ye as the resistance leader and comedian Fan Wei as a collaborator with the Nazis in the Safe Zone. Nonetheless, Hideo Nakaizumi as Takada, the Japanese lead, is markedly outclassed. While never jarring or overplayed his performance is simply not up to carrying what is admittedly a fairly obvious stand-in for an entire nation’s act of contrition.
Nonetheless, "City of Life and Death" is a revelation, comfortably proving mainland Chinese film is more than capable of keeping the Communist regime happy while still producing absolutely terrific cinema. While it is uncertain if this reflects any kind of change in policy from the party or their censors, it is worth noting Lu Chuan received multiple death threats for City’s refusal to demonize the Japanese, yet a member of the Politburo personally intervened to keep the film in theaters. For those viewers who feel they’re up to some of the most heartbreaking cinematic set-pieces in recent memory without the possibility of Hollywood redemption, or exploring the furthest extremes of terror and desperation without resorting to flooding the screen with gore, "City of Life and Death" ranks among the finest films ever made and comes hugely recommended.
(全文完）

7-10楼Shannon和英特的的中文翻译已经发了，正在审核中。希望尽快出笼以免和原文分离太远。

BY SIWATU MOORE/spooningthemonkey.
2009.09.19
The City of Life and Death – You know you’re in for a downer of a movie when one of the most sympathetic characters is a Nazi. Lu Chuan’s The City of Life and Death depicts one of the most sensitive episodes in modern Asian history, the fall of Nanking.
Americans hear very little about the Pacific Theater until our own involvement following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Prior to the film, I was vaguely familiar with Sino-Japanese relations during the early 20th century. I knew they'd fought but not the specifics of those wars. I’d heard the phrase “the rape of Nanking” on occasion and perhaps had read a brief bit on it, but not enough to prepare me for this film. The film opens with the Japanese siege of Nanking as thousands of Chinese soldiers begin to abandon the lost city. A small contingent stays behind to mount one final wave of resistance against the advancing Japanese. After a brief but valiant effort, the remaining Chinese soldiers are rounded up and summarily executed. These executions are shown in brutal detail and are all harrowing to watch. Live burnings and burials, repeated bayonetting, mowing down thousands with heavy machine gun fire, you name it. The Japanese seemed to revel in how many ways they could liquidate their captives. After the remnants of the Chinese army are disposed of, the Japanese soldiers begin indiscriminately killing civilians, mostly men, some children. Then things get really bad.
A group of international aide workers (its never really clear who they work for—the patches on their arms seemed to suggest the Red Cross) has gathered many of the city’s remaining residents in a “safe zone” under the protection of a Nazi businessman, John Rabe (historical figure). The trouble begins when Japanese soldiers begin raping young girls inside the “safe zone.” The military leaders initially apologize for the offense, but you soon realize not only are they insincere, but they have perhaps encouraged their soldiers to behave in such a way.
It only gets worse as they begin demanding women be turned over to act as “comfort women” for the Japanese soldiers. There is one Japanese serviceman with a shred of conscience whom we follow through the film, Kadokawa. He seems to be the only honorable Japanese person in the film (there's also a Japanese prostitute whom he falls in love with who is a pretty blameless if pathetic character). Even so, the director took criticism for showing any sympathetic Japanese characters. It’s like having a sympathetic Nazi in a Holocaust movie. (I don’t believe there was one in Schindler’s List). Not saying this is necessary, but it makes the movie more bearable for the viewer to at least indulge in the speculation that there were soldiers who actively disapproved of what was going on. It was also a brave choice on the director’s part.
The movie does not hold back in showing the atrocities of the Japanese army. Many of the events depicted were grounded in fact and the recollection of survivors so I don’t doubt the authenticity (interesting to note that just like Holocaust deniers, there are "Rape of Nanking"-deniers as well). It’s a lot to absorb though. It’s the kind of film that gives me doubts about humanity. Whenever I see films that depict some of the darkest moments in modern human history such as the Holocaust or Rwandan genocide, I just wonder: “how can people act this way?” It raises the uncomfortable idea that within all of us is the capacity to rape or murder or dehumanize another person almost completely. It’s really quite frightening. Other things I left the movie eager to find out about were: how did the Chinese end up revering Lenin, what caused the Sino-Japanese War and how did the Chinese lose so badly? Highly recommended.

好，加油啊

谢谢！加油！

&#9824

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17,
2009南京！南京！Nanjing! Nanjing! (City of Life and Death)
by Storyteller
Extremely hard-to-watch movie about the take of Nanking by the Japanese and all the atrocities that come after conquer subdues conquered. I still have engraved in my brain the last words spoken in this movie: “Life is harder than death”. You have no idea how true those words are, especially after watching this mesmerizing film about the atrocities the Japanese did in WWII.
The film looks and feels so realistic that at times gives the impression of being a documentary, moving pictures taken when everything was happening in reality. But this is no documentary as has a narrative that tells in silence what one Japanese soldier sees since he entered the city after the Chinese surrendered. What he sees (and we do too) is truly horrendous and very emotional for the character and for viewers, so definitively is not a film and story for the weak.
I couldn’t stop watching because the images and the storytelling are impressive, but my heart and body shrunk and still feel the pain of what I saw. Yes the film inhabits a strange space between art movie and the mainstream that will totally blow your mind if you can stand what’s shown in the screen.
The film is in black and white with very few words spoken in different languages, including some writings in English at the very beginning that I interpret as the writings of John Rabe, the German that saved many Chinese during the “rape” of Nanking. Top production values with top performances; but honestly, the story is really hard to watch even when the images are spectacular. In particular the end of the movie is almost surreal with Japanese soldiers dancing at the beat of their giant drums and the film ending in a large field with tiny white flowers.
As someone says, it’s common that cinema portraits what Germans did in WWII but very seldom audiences have the opportunity to watch what the Japanese did. This is one opportunity that many should not miss for the History lesson told in a non-melodramatic and emotion-intense way.
I do recommend the movie as a movie to those that like art in their movies and to those that don’t too (it's also mainstream); but insist that the story is not for the weak. This is not a movie to enjoy but just to keep the rating system I mention the word, enjoy.
Enjoy!!!

By Robert Bell (Exclaim.ca)
http://www.exclaim.ca/motionreviews/latestsub.aspx?csid1=136&csid2=871&fid1=41127
City of Life and Death
Directed by Lu Chuan
Filmed entirely in black and white, Lu Chuan's testament to the Rape of Nanking unapologetically reveals some of the horrors that occurred during the 1937 Japanese raid on China. Multiple perspectives connect and weave through the Chinese, Japanese and foreign aid experiences, as grief and chaos rule the trajectory of the film, itself concerned more with feeling and experience than storytelling.
It's a gruelling watch, truth be told, as little pleasure can be derived from watching repeated rape and slaughter, but it succeeds in its aim of presenting an unflinching look at historical injustice.
Touching on various characters and moments, the film starts with the initial battle, overlong with gunfire and explosions, as Nanking is decimated, moving on to a band of Chinese guerrilla fighters led by General Lu (Liu Ye). Jumping to the other side, we see atrocities through the eyes of an idealistic Japanese soldier named Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), whose distain for the action of his colleagues is exacerbated by the treatment of a Japanese prostitute (Yuko Miyamoto).
Probably the most affecting segment of the film involves a young aid worker (Gao Yuanyuan), hiding in a German war-free zone, who risks her life to protect the innocent despite the inevitability of mass prostitution and exploitation.
Both the strength and weakness of City of Life and Death is its innate ability to bring the audience into the action, observing it from within, rather than framing each shot as a storyboard and narrative device. While we can engage with the latter monstrosities, watching women dress like men to avoid rape and their children being thrown out of third story windows, a lack of focus keeps specified identification and connections at bay.
Also problematic are the many extended sequences of battle and brutality that add nothing to the film, with almost 20 to 30 minutes of erroneous material bogging down what could have been a concise and affecting experience.
With so much arresting material proving the film's thesis, repeated blows only numb and dilute. What works, however, works well, making City a memorable experience overall. (Media Asia)

The Horrors of Bearing Witness: Lu Chuan’s “City of Life and Death”
by Karina Longworth
(posted on September 17, 2009)
War movies produced by commercial film industries have a tendency to show any given conflict not as it is or was, but as the side footing the bill for the film would like for it have been. The essential moral irony of war — that acts that would be considered revoltingly inhumane if committed in the name of the individual are not only sanctioned but celebrated when committed in the name of country –– has rarely been reflected on screen as honestly as in ‘City of Life and Death,” Lu Chuan’s stunning dramatic take on the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, China. Unafraid to depict the blurring of moral boundaries on either side of the conflict, “Life and Death” manages to convey the total horror of the Japanese atrocities from the perspective of both perpetrators and victims, all with exceptional nuance, sensitivity and sadness.
In a three-day siege, the Japanese forces vanquished the bulk of the Chinese army and reduced the city, at that time the capital of China, to rubble. The women, children and Chinese soldiers who managed to survive were told they’d be safe if they remained within the confines of a refuge area run by a number of Westerners, including Nazi John Rabe (John Paisley) and American schoolteacher Minnie Vautrin (Beverly Peckous), both real figures who whose diaries and letters were read by actors in the recent documentary Nanking), and Rabe’s Chinese assistant Mr. Tang (Fan Wei). The safe zone did not remain safe for long: soon frustrated Japanese soldiers, given a taste of “comfort” by a visiting Japanese prostitute, begin regularly breaking in to the camp to gang rape women and girls. Rabe appeals to Hitler to intervene, and is told by the high command that it would be best to abandon the refuge camp, rather than sully Germany’s relationship with Japan. Mr. Tang is left to negotiate, and in the hopes of protecting his own wife and daughters, strikes a deal that will force 100 women from the camp to “volunteer” their services at a makeshift Japanese brothel.
“City” shifts its perspective back and forth between Tang’s struggle to keep the peace by playing “friend” to the Japanese, and the tour through hell of a young Japanese soldier named Kudokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), who is overtaken by an inconvenient crisis of conscience after falling in love with prostitute Yuriko (Yuko Miyamota). Neither protagonist would be considered hero material in a traditional war film, and this is actually one of City’s key accomplishments: Lu’s meticulous depiction of the horrors of war is just set up for his exploration of the internal conflict of two men conscious of their own role in the unspeakable.
Sometimes Lu suddenly drops us in the middle of chaos unfolding so quickly there’s no way to find our bearings; other times he subjects us to unblinking procedurals that seem to take a moment and stretch it out the point of an endurance test. In one sequence, the heads of the camp are trying to negotiate with a few Japanese soldiers who have forced their way in, when occupators suddenly take the upper hand by swiftly murdering Tang’s daughter before his eyes. Another sequence slowly, carefully depicts the dispatching of thousands of prisoners of war via increasingly baroque methods: mass drownings, live burials, live en masse incinerations. The see-saw back and forth leads to a cumulative queasiness. The name of the game is to give the viewer a sense of the total dislocation and disorientation of war, a psychological grey zone that renders combatants and civilians caught in the crossfire equally incapable of real-world rationality. It seems as though this indoctrination process is complete by the time the Japanese soldiers break out into a surreally intense victory dance, but the scene’s controlled madness is still incredibly unnerving. Shot in silvery black and white with an epic sense of the frame, “City of Life and Death” has the feel of a lost post-War foreign classic, a masterwork implicating the viewer in the horrors of bearing witness.


短评汇集：
(1)
http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/2009/09/previewing-toronto-film-festival.php
  
9/10/09Reviews in Cannes were super positive for Chinese filmmaker Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death (left), a black-and-white fictional account of the 1937 “rape of Nanking” by the Japanese military. Lu explores the reaction of both Chinese and Japanese characters; perhaps this is the reason he has received death threats for being too soft on the latter. Why do I put stock in this movie? His poignant Mountain Patrol: Kekexili was the revelation of the New York Asian Film Festival a few years back. —


(3)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/toronto-film-fest-day-1-p_b_283085.html
By Michael Glitz (Twitter)
CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH *** despite the weak finale -- This Chinese film tackles the Rape Of Nanking and like the fine Katyn of last year, it's basically a catalog of horrors, presented soberly and well. How do you critique it, I felt at first. Though the horrors pile on, the film takes a few interesting tacks. First, it's shot in beautiful black and white. Second, we see much of the film through the eyes of a Japanese soldier, who is distraught by the horror around him. Since the Japanese soldiers generally partake in one horrific act after another, this was a welcome attempt not to paint them as pure Evil (which frankly would detract from the horrors that occurred -- they were committed by real people, not monsters, which makes it worse). A few brief English language characters are all so poorly and awkwardly voiced, you'd swear the actors were dubbed. I felt a strong emotional connection even as I felt the movie didn't try and manipulate me too much (stock characters of noble woman, cynical whore, and plucky child notwithstanding). They hit a good finale with the Japanese soldiers celebrating their victory with a martial parade. But that's undercut by a soft coda in which the film tries to underplay the misery of what we've seen by emphasizing too much the guilt of our Japanese hero and the potential for a happier future for at least one Chinese survivor. It rings false after a film that rang mostly true. Still, there was decent applause for the movie at the end, the strongest of the day.