Talking about the war (2)

Purple Butterfly is an entirely different kettle of fish. Whereas Guizi is shot (apart from final frames) in black and white and is quite straightforward in presentation of narrative, Butterfly is a film noir shot in colour (though often in near darkness) and uses flashback & jumpy editing to interrupt narrative flow. Put simply, this makes it quite confusing (did we see Yiling get shot? Has she survived or is this a flashback?) but, on the other hand, this means that film plays with what we think we know about the unfolding plot, which is as good a way of approaching the war as I can think of.

I think it's slightly puzzling that Butterfly attracted less criticism as a film-set-during-war than Guizi. Release was somewhat delayed by SARS outbreak (where did I read that?), but unlike Guizi it doesn't seem to have been banned. But if we subject it to same kind of reading (and admit again that this not what Lou Ye aiming for - his statement on the Zhang Ziyi site seems almost deliberately delphic) it makes some equally troubling suggestions about the war/pre-war period.

The affair between Itami and Xinxia is (in context of 1920s Manchuria, and esp in light of subsequent events) moderately controversial, but that is defused by Xinxia's subsequent choices - after Itami's return to Tokyo and her brother's death at hands of Japanese, she chooses resistance to Japan over love for Itami and while we may see internal conflicts over that choice I don't think there is any suggestion that she seriously doubts what she is doing so - in conventional terms - her earlier mistake is redeemed, and Itami's reversion to stock Japanese imperialist confirms the rightness of that decision.

But although Itami plays to type, it's less certain that Xinxia (as Ding Hui) and other resistance fighters do. These, after all, are supposed (according to the master narrative of war) to be the noble defenders of China's sovereignty and dignity, yet Lou Ye does not seem at all interested in pursuing that line. The resistance cell members are allowed to be flawed and self-interested (human...), and indeed they seem even less sympathetic than stereotype in contrast to Situ and Xiling, who radiate a warmth and innocence lacking anywhere else in film but who are destroyed accidentally (casually?) in crossfire of struggle against Japanese.

So is Lou Ye more respectful than Jiang Wen of the sensitivities of those who feel that the war has to be portrayed 'correctly'? I'm not sure he is. He shows a lot more (tangentially, but inevitably because of where film is set) of orthodox story in terms of popular resistance to Japan, and leaves us in no doubt of Japanese brutalities in war and pre-war period (the final sequence of archive footage, for example); but like Jiang he declines to assign leadership of resistance explicitly to CCP; he allows Xinxia's question as she leaves for the pivotal encounter at the railway station 'What are we fighting for?' to hang in the air unanswered; and the question of responsibility for the destruction of Situ and Xiling is also left open.

So why the difference? Can you say things (hide things) in a convoluted noirish thriller that you can't in a film that visually echoes early postwar patriotic drama and tells an unorthodox story straight through from beginning to end? Can the masters of the master narrative simply not keep up with Lou Ye's style?