If my job hadn’t required me to write a review, I would have walked out of the cinema 40 minutes after City of Life and Death opened. That is roughly about the time it took for the Japanese soldiers to start to massacre the Chinese civilians of Nanking. It is, though, not a matter of the quality of the film but a matter of taste. (A few in the audience, who obviously didn’t have any such work commitment, did take their leave.)

The third full-length feature of young Chinese director Lu Chuan, City of Life and Death, or Nanking! Nanking! – a literal translation of the Chinese title which more directly indicates what the film is about – reconstructs the overwhelming killing and rape in what we now call the Nanking Massacre during WWII. The 132-minute film mainly depicts the event through three characters: shot in black and white it opens to brutal combat in which soldier Lu Jiangxiong (Liu Ye), together with hundreds of other Chinese soldiers, is captured and killed. Meanwhile Mr Tang (Fan Wei) desperately tries to protect his beautiful wife and daughter after his boss John Rabe, a Nazi businessman known as the Chinese Schindler, returns to the Reich. And young Japanese soldier Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) struggles with the brutality he witnesses during his first sexual encounter with a Japanese prostitute in the army base.

The film has been hailed as a major breakthrough in storytelling because it is the first Chinese film to explore this historical wound through the eyes of a Japanese officer. That is indeed admirable, but it also simply shows how backward, both politically and artistically, the Mainland film industry – and society as a whole – is. (While other soldiers are raping Chinese girls, pure-hearted Kadokawa is developing a spiritual relationship with a Japanese prostitute in a very “safe” construction of a supposedly sensitive and controversial character. Also ironically, although the film sees things through the eyes of a Japanese soldier who, unable to live with his assumption of guilt, kills himself, the Japanese government has never recognized the massacre, still referring to it as the ‘Nanking Incident’.) Marketing for the film stresses how the Nanking civilians fought until the very end, but sadly I saw none of that in the film. After the opening 45-minutes of battle during which the Japanese troops take over the city, all we see is the Chinese being brutally killed and anyone who has even cursorily studied Chinese history will already be well familiar with the savagery. There is little resistance: The women did not ‘sacrifice themselves to save the men in the refugee camp’ – does anyone really believe those women had a choice over what was done to them?

And that leads me to wonder why filmmakers are still so passionate about putting such events on screen. Is it to glorify the deceased and those who survived, as the film thinks it is doing; or simply to show the brutality and one’s powerlessness to change anything, which is what the film actually communicates? Should a film compel us to hate our enemy and pity our fellow countrymen more, so fostering nationalism, or should it teach us how to love life, give us hope for humanity and develop in us a more holistic world view? Shouldn’t it, at least, offer us a new perspective with which to access history?

City of Life and Death is no doubt an epic. It is superb on every technical level. The cinematography, sound and visual effects, music, art direction etc all powerfully and effectively portray the ruined city. All the actors – including the hundreds of thousands of extras – provide moving and first-class performances. The choice to shoot in black and white and the unmelodramatic approach to the killing scenes are effectively disturbing. Different from any other Chinese films made on the subject, City of Life and Death is undoubtedly a breathtaking work. But not everyone wants to be suffocated in the cinema. Rachel Mok