The Flowers of War

It is said that war brings out the best and worst of the peo­ple. In fact most of the war movies have been cen­tered on this theme. What should be seen is how suc­cess­ful­ly the screen­play builds those sit­u­a­tions and fac­tors which bring out the best and the worst of the peo­ple. ‘The Flow­ers of War’ is an exam­ple of excel­lent inge­nu­ity in this regard.

The dra­ma of the movie takes place in a cathe­dral in Nanking, the ex-cap­i­tal of Chi­na dur­ing the sec­ond Sino-Japan­ese War in 1937. The city has almost been cap­tured and destroyed, hun­dred thou­sands have been mur­dered and great many raped. A squad of Chi­nese sol­diers is fight­ing the final bat­tle of sav­ing some dozen female con­vent chil­dren; mean­while a lone west­ern­er, a mor­ti­cian, is striv­ing to reach the cathe­dral to bury the dead priest. The girls even­tu­al­ly end up in the cathe­dral, soon to be joined by a group of same num­ber of females from the Nanking’s red light area. Then this uneasy gath­er­ing of a philis­tine west­ern­er, con­vent girls, pros­ti­tutes and a young pro­tégé of the deceased priest of the cathe­dral race against the time to flee the dan­ger of immi­nent threat of rape and mur­der.

The west­ern­er, fine­ly played by Chris­t­ian Bale, trans­forms into a priest to res­cue the shel­tered girls but that would not be enough. Japan­ese are too bru­tal to let these young vir­gins go. It is then that the ‘bad women’ of red light area take the great­est act of courage in sav­ing not only the young girls but also the trace of human­i­ty left in the God-for­sak­en sham­bles of Nanking. The title of the movie ‘The Flow­ers of War’ is actu­al­ly from this redemp­tive sac­ri­fice of the pros­ti­tutes. The cen­tral theme of sav­ing young girls is sym­bol­ic of strug­gle of the present gen­er­a­tion to save the future ones.

The final impact left by the movie is quite over­whelm­ing both emo­tion­al­ly and cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly. With grip­ping screen­play, pow­er­ful dia­logues, superb act­ing, enchant­i­ng music and cam­era work no less than Hol­ly­wood, it is one of the best movies of the year, per­haps that of decade. It also entails a promis­ing future for Chi­nese cin­e­ma. The movie was released on the 74^th anniver­sary of Nanking Mas­sacre. It did great in Chi­na but could not do much busi­ness in rest of the world. Chi­na offi­cial­ly sub­mit­ted this movie for Oscars but was not even short­list­ed, which is a dis­ap­point­ment.

This movie is rec­om­mend­ed for a much broad­er audi­ence of coun­try such as ours to get a heart touch­ing sense of human­i­ty in the face of utter bru­tal­i­ty and war.