Everyone already knows the story. In December 1938, Japanese soldiers captured Nanjing. In the Nanjing Catholic Church, two groups of women took refuge there. One group is a female student from a mission school; the other group is a business girl on the Qinhuai River. A fake priest from the United States, John, represented the church in dealing with the Japanese occupation authorities. When the Japanese soldiers were about to take the female students away from the ravages, the business women stepped forward and replaced the female students.
Sitting in the theater, it feels like this is almost an American movie. The arrangement and rhythm are Hollywood-style, and even the leading actor is American actor Christian Bale. In addition to a lot of English, Chinese speaks the Nanjing dialect, which has got rid of the accent of CCTV. The photography is very good, it is cool to photograph the soldiers of the national army, and it is beautiful to photograph the business women of Qinhuai. The Jiangnan Sizhu in the film is also the music that old farmers love to listen to. Zhang Yimou's usual weakness is to compose stories. This time the composing is basically smooth. It seems that Liu Heng and Yan Geling have played a role. Some details are a little too hard and too coincidental. For example, the daughter of Bell's character John "Father" died at the age of a female student Shujuan, and the top business girl Yumo was opened by a client at this age to establish these two with female students. Secretly emotional connection. But this at least shows that the screenwriter has tried his best. There is even black humor in the play. Shujuan's father, who worked as an interpreter for the Japanese army, saw that there was no daughter of his own among the "girl students" who were dragged away by the Japanese.
China's first basically Hollywoodized (to put it better, globalization) film may be considered an epoch in the history of Chinese film, but to open up overseas, it must be a high-quality Hollywood film. It's a pity that foreigners don't sell well, at least the few American film reviews I found don't sell well. We Chinese have read some martial arts novels, and business women just die on behalf of female students with a chivalrous sentiment, and they still find it acceptable. American film critics think the whole story is not credible, as it is purely sensational. In fact, it's chivalrous, and it's more or less repaying.
The limitations of Zhang Yimou can be seen here. This old boy is also an old peasant's virtue, rooted in his native soil and unwavering, although his performance is different. The old farmer is self-knowing and trying to pretend that he is only a high school degree—English is barely a British middle school degree, other subjects Chinese middle school—but he pretends to be a bit literate all day long; Lao Mouzi and I Like the folks in my hometown, sitting on the ridge and chatting, there are always two sentences in the three sentences that are related to the physiological preferences of men. In an interview with Southern Weekend (December 15), he said: "In the early stage of creation, I discussed with many experts, and the experts told me a lot about Qinhuai culture, because the movie is about Qinhuai women"-more strictly Said, "The Flower of the Fallen City" talked about "only" Qinhuai women. The other group of women in the movie, Shu Juan and the others, were affected by the Christian culture of the church students, but I'm sorry, they all forgot. Lao Mouzi is only interested in business women, so he would not think of asking an expert to teach him Christianity. No wonder Shujuan and the others in the movie prayed, and they didn't even draw a cross.
Shujuan and the others are convent students in the movie, and they go to a girls' school run by a nun's college. In that era, they were trained by prospective nuns. Moreover, the fourteen years old at that time was not the fourteen years old today. The fourteen years old today is still stupid. He was already a quasi-adult at that time. It is impossible for them not to have received basic religious education, and it is impossible for them to be unaffected by the activities of missionaries. One of the great things that missionaries did in China was to take in prostitutes and treat them. Next year will be the 120th anniversary of Pearl Buck's birth. She will become the first female Nobel Laureate Writer for the Nobel Prize for Literature because she wrote The Good Earth, a work describing Chinese farmers. Ama Wang, who took her and taught her Chinese since childhood, was redeemed from the brothel by Pearl Buck’s missionary parents. But Lao Mouzi photographed these students as if they had received an old-style Chinese education. They looked down on business women and prevented Yumo and them from using the toilets upstairs. If it is changed that the business women were discriminated against when they fled, and people were not allowed to enter the hiding hole; instead, these female students regarded them as lost lambs that could be saved, and the two groups of women began to interact with each other. Have some emotional foundation that foreigners can understand?
In the movie now, before the death of the substitute, there is almost no contact between the two groups of women. In fact, girls can be used as translators for business women, when business women want to deal with "Father John". Rather than compiling the kind of unreliable bridge where Yumo was once a top student in a mission school (so speak fluent English), it is better to compile Shujuan's mother who was kind to Yumo, which is more in line with the chivalry of Chinese people.
Director Zhang and the screenwriters seem to want to transfer the responsibility of protecting female students to the business women through instructor Li who sacrificed to rescue female students. However, this "transfer" account is neither clear nor credible.
One of the major failures of "The Flower of the Fallen City" was that the female students climbed up to the church bell tower to commit suicide, which led to the generosity of the business woman's death. The question is, can Catholics commit suicide? Suicide is tantamount to betraying God. At least let Shujuan and the others argue, right? If you decide to commit suicide after discussion, you should also ask God for forgiveness before committing suicide: Lord, forgive me for being too weak to stand up to this evil.
As for the decision to exchange after death, at least the old farmer finds it emotionally difficult to accept. Knowing that the business girl will die on her own, how can the girls pass the student uniform with a smile? Even if Bell lied to them, saying that the business women are professionals and are more than enough to deal with the Japanese soldiers, the female students should also know that the business women are going to be ill-advised—the other party is asking for funerals. Facing a life-saver, it is difficult to deal with emotionally, and a fourteen-year-old girl can't handle it. If Bell is a sensible person, he should separate the two groups of women and not let them see each other again. The uniform can be collected by the boy George (only this character in the movie is completely natural) and handed over to the business lady. Of course, Dadao Zhang had to have this scene to induce business women to sing "Qin Huai Jing" together.
Dadao Zhang is very good at describing the posture of business women, but he doesn't care about the psychological development of female students. Bell drove the truck out of Nanjing, and Shujuan's voiceover said that she had never seen Yumo and the others again, or even knew their names, and the movie was over. The old farmer really wants to ask Shujuan—she will be 87 years old this year—after experiencing such a thing, what you did with your life, which was saved by a humble but noble woman?
"The Flower of the Fallen City" is reminiscent of Maupassant's masterpiece "Boule de Suif" (Boule de Suif). The end of an inspiring reflection like Master Mo might look like this:
Shu Juan later participated in the Anti-Japanese War and worked as an interpreter for the US military instructors who assisted China. After the victory, she went to the United States to continue her studies, got a Ph.D., and became a professor. After China's reform and opening up, Shujuan returned to China to look for Yumo and the others. She only found Yumo's daughter. Yumo’s daughter told Shujuan: Yumo survived. After 1949, she was the target of repeated political campaigns, saying that she was a broken shoe and a traitor (this is the truth of certain women who were forced to be "comfort women". Experience) until he became unbearable and committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Shujuan told Yumo's daughter the story that Yumo had never told and had nowhere to tell. Shujuan hugged Yumo's daughter and said: Your mother and my father, they were not bad people. They just lived in bad time.
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