Kawashima Yoshiko

Troubling combination of the wooden and the hysterical, this film...

Kawashima/Aisin Gioro Xianyu/Jin Bihui (a Qing princess brought up in Japan after 1913, who returned to Manchuria to work with the Japanese and was executed after the end of the war as a traitor) may well have been a more interesting character than Pu Yi, but she's not well served on film. She appears in The Last Emperor as a rather bizarre caricature ("I'm a traitor and I don't care who knows it!"), and here - where she holds centre stage for a full 96 minutes - she is neither appealing nor even particularly interesting.

And she should be fascinating. While Pu Yi is holed up in the Forbidden City she is being educated in Japan; after she returns to China she moves (or is moved) into the forefront of Sino-Japanese collaborations in Manzhouguo, and by the end of the film she is identifying herself as Japanese. Although the film chooses to portray her as an independent actor, it doesn't explore the implications of that portrayal and she is generally shown through her relationships with men (dull and shouty affairs).

The contemporary films are piling up on my shelves but this month I have mostly been watching historical pieces: Last Emperor, Devils on the Doorstep, To Live, and 55 Days at Peking (bit incongruous that one, but I was sort of asked to show it). 55 Days is quite a beast. I was quite surprised at how late it was made - having caught part of it on TV, I imagined it was a 1950s production, but, no, they were still making films about the Boxers in 1963. I was showing it for the Boxer images, but it contained a whole mush of references to films of every genre you can think of: Charlton Heston as John Wayne; heroic young soldier who doesn't want to live if he loses his leg; noble wives; acres of stiff upper lips. And you look at the whole thing and think that by this time the US had troops in Vietnam...