One of the most thought-provoking questions about the Nanjing Massacre is how did the Japanese soldiers—many of them still in their teens—turn into killing machines? What makes them dehumanized? From "Nanjing! Nanjing! From the beginning of ", Director Lu Chuan seems to intend to analyze this issue. At the beginning of the film, a fierce street battle was arranged. Although the Chinese army remnant headed by the character played by Liu Ye was not large in number, it also caused heavy losses to a small detachment of the Japanese army. Of course, this can be understood as the director used the war scene to form an impactful visual paragraph, so that the film can better meet the requirements of the market. However, I prefer to think that the director hopes to use this plot to answer the above question: the Japanese occupying forces entering Nanjing are only 50,000 people, and they want to rule the city with a population of 600,000 to 700,000 people, of which there may be nearly 100,000 people. Chinese soldiers with weapons, many of them may become potential enemies of the occupying army, so the Japanese army is in a very tense state; in addition, the Japanese army occupied Shanghai after a long and fierce battle in the Battle of Songhu, and the tenacious resistance of the Chinese army is far away Far beyond their expectations (the Japanese army had planned to occupy the whole of China within 3 months), the Japanese had accumulated a lot of anger and wanted to vent; the combination of fear and anger caused those soldiers to lose the basic morality shared by human beings . In other words, it was the war itself that turned Japanese soldiers into murderous maniacs. This is a very reasonable explanation. Of course, more research is needed on whether the plot at the beginning of the film is consistent with historical facts. The information I have seen so far is that after Tang Shengzhi received Chiang Kai-shek's order to abandon Nanjing, the Chinese army has entered a state of chaos and cannot organize effective resistance at all. However, literary and artistic works do not necessarily need to accurately match historical facts, and more importantly, they should stimulate more thinking and research. From this point of view, it is worthy of affirmation that the film attempts to analyze the mentality of the Japanese soldiers. From a nationalist standpoint, some argue that the film should not tell the story from the point of view of the Japanese soldier Kadokawa. I think this is not only not a problem, but may create the conditions for the success of the film, because only the point of view of a Japanese soldier can analyze and answer the important question mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph.
However, to my surprise, in the following parts, the film does not emphasize the change in Kadokawa's attitude towards murder. In this way, the war scene at the beginning suddenly lost its motivation and foothold, so it was just a powerful visual fragment. Compared with the TV series "Soldier Assault", the process of the protagonist's adaptation to killing is very dramatic and convincing to the audience. As for the film about the Nanjing Massacre, the characters are placed in an environment full of killing, but they do not deal with the question of how people adapt to killing, which is very regrettable to me.
In this way, the first paragraph of the film ends, and the following story begins with Mr. Tang as the main character. Mr. Tang is the secretary of Mr. Rabe, chairman of the Nanjing International Security Zone Committee. In order to protect his family, Tang tried his best and unscrupulously, and did not hesitate to cooperate with the Japanese army to indirectly betray the refugees in the safe zone. But at the end of this story, he gave the opportunity to leave Nanjing to others and died calmly. The image of this character is relatively full, and it is credible because of its flaws, and it can attract the audience's approval because of its contrast and changes. But even in this story, the development of the plot is not compact, and there are still some passages like the murder and rape exhibition without narrative motivation mentioned at the beginning of this article. What's more, the Kadokawa-related plot, which is the main clue, almost stagnated, making the whole film lack a sense of unity. It's only later in this paragraph that Kadokawa falls in love with a military prostitute from Japan, and yet it's hard to see how the plot makes any sense here. Of course, it can be argued that Kadokawa feels empty inside in an environment full of killing, and thus easily finds solace in sex, just like Mr. Yi in Lust, Caution. However, because Kadokawa's inner sense of emptiness was not described in detail, it is difficult for the audience to have a strong sense of identification with the love in this war.
The point of view of the last story of the film returns to Kadokawa. In this section, the director finally lets us see the change in Kadokawa's psychology, and he finally collapsed at the celebration ceremony of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing. He then let go of the two nearly killed Chinese, and then shot himself. Kadokawa's repentance has historical basis. We all know the repentance of some Japanese veterans represented by Toshiro after the war. Even if most of the repenting Japanese veterans did not complete their psychological transformation until after the war, the film's advance of this process into the war is a reasonable creative fiction. In addition, Zhang Chunru's "Nanjing Atrocities" also recorded an example: a Chinese girl was taken seriously ill after being taken as a comfort woman. Sending her back to Nanjing City, the Japanese officer bears a resemblance to Kadokawa. However, Kadokawa's psychological change in the movie came too late, I think the audience may have been at a loss because of the change of viewpoint, or impatient because of the lack of progress in the plot. In addition, the incentives for Kadokawa's psychological changes also appear to be too roundabout. Kadokawa's remorse seems to have happened like this: He fell in love with a Japanese military prostitute and therefore could no longer tolerate the violence of his peers against Chinese women and thus the whole atrocities of the Japanese army. The logic of this incentive is relatively complicated, and if it is not specially explained, I am afraid it will not be very persuasive to the audience.
When it comes to the portrayal of the characters' psychology, we can compare Lu Chuan's previous work "Looking for Guns", which vividly portrayed the characters' anxiety through various audio-visual means. In this film about the Nanjing Massacre, the story takes place in a very extreme situation, and it was possible to show the violent inner conflict of the characters, but the result is that the characters' psychological depiction is vague or bland for a large part of the time. It's a pity.
"Nanjing! Nanjing! "The point of view of this movie jumps between Japanese soldiers, Chinese prisoners of war and Mr. Tang, making it difficult for the audience to establish a stable identity, which is an important reason for the weakness of the plot. We can think that director Lu Chuan's narrative ambition is too big, hoping to show the whole incident of the Nanjing Massacre in a panoramic manner, so he has set too many clues in the story, which is beyond his own control. But I think there is another explanation, that is, his arrangement is just a more conservative and safe strategy. In order to make a breakthrough in analyzing the psychology of Japanese soldiers, the director set up Kadokawa, a clue that runs through the whole film. But just imagine that if the whole film is more compact and focused around this thread, the accusations based on the nationalist stand mentioned above will be stronger, and the director may even feel that this is wrong in his heart. As a compromise, he scatters the story to multiple different clues and viewpoints, and occasionally inserts some murder and rape exhibitions that lack narrative motivation, making the film more in line with the expectations of certain audiences. If it can be explained in this way, that is to say, the director once tried to explore the darkness and light in the depths of human nature through such an extreme subject as the Nanjing Massacre, but this eventually became a half-assed attempt.
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