IndieWire网站：恐怖的见证陆川的《南京南京》

　　IndieWire网站2011年5月10日的影评

　　恐怖的见证：陆川的《南京！南京！》

　　作者：著名影评人Karina Longworth

　　战争题材的影片一般在表现冲突时并不注重真实性，而是按着出资方的意志来展现。有些行径如果是个人行为的话会被认为是惨绝人寰，但是如果打着国家的旗号，不但不被制止，而被大佳赞赏——这就是战争道德意义的反讽。很少有作品能像陆川的《南京》那样真实地再现这个道理。《南京》大胆地模糊了交战双方的道德界限，从入侵者和受害者双方，细致、敏感、悲伤而全面地展现了日军的暴行。

　　《南京》的故事不时在唐先生和角川之间切换。唐先生为了维护和平，成为了日本人的“朋友”；角川在爱上妓女之后，面对眼前的一切，内心经受着良心的煎熬。这两个角色在传统的电影题材中都不能称之为“英雄”，但这正是《南京》的成功之处：对于战争中恐怖的细致入微的刻画，正是探寻这两人人物内心挣扎的绝好背景。

　　有时陆川瞬间把我们丢入一片混乱当中，以至于我们一时都摸不清方向。有时又把我们带入环环相扣的情节当中，这情节步步紧逼，最终发现是对我们忍耐力极限的考验。综合交错、舒缓有致的情节安排让恐惧和不安在心里蔓延。这场游戏的目的就是为了让观众感到在战争中的迷失，表达了心理上的一个灰色地带，在这个地带里入侵者和受害者都失去了平时真实世界中的理性。《南京》是一部战后外语电影的经典，这部经典之作让观众深深地见证了那段历史的残酷。

　　REVIEW | The Horrors of Bearing Witness: Lu Chuan’s “City of Life and Death”

　　By Karina Longworth (Updated 4 hours, 54 minutes ago)

　　Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death."

　　War movies produced by commercial film industries have a tendency to show any given conflict not as it is or was, but as the side footing the bill for the film would like for it have been. The essential moral irony of war — that acts that would be considered revoltingly inhumane if committed in the name of the individual are not only sanctioned but celebrated when committed in the name of country –– has rarely been reflected on screen as honestly as in “City of Life and Death,” Lu Chuan’s stunning dramatic take on the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, China. Unafraid to depict the blurring of moral boundaries on either side of the conflict, “Life and Death” manages to convey the total horror of the Japanese atrocities from the perspective of both perpetrators and victims, all with exceptional nuance, sensitivity and sadness.

　　In a three-day siege, the Japanese forces vanquished the bulk of the Chinese army and reduced the city, at that time the capital of China, to rubble. The women, children and Chinese soldiers who managed to survive were told they’d be safe if they remained within the confines of a refuge area run by a number of Westerners, including Nazi John Rabe (John Paisley) and American schoolteacher Minnie Vautrin (Beverly Peckous), both real figures who whose diaries and letters were read by actors in the recent documentary Nanking), and Rabe’s Chinese assistant Mr. Tang (Fan Wei). The safe zone did not remain safe for long: soon frustrated Japanese soldiers, given a taste of “comfort” by a visiting Japanese prostitute, begin regularly breaking in to the camp to gang rape women and girls. Rabe appeals to Hitler to intervene, and is told by the high command that it would be best to abandon the refuge camp, rather than sully Germany’s relationship with Japan. Mr. Tang is left to negotiate, and in the hopes of protecting his own wife and daughters, strikes a deal that will force 100 women from the camp to “volunteer” their services at a makeshift Japanese brothel.

　　“City” shifts its perspective back and forth between Tang’s struggle to keep the peace by playing “friend” to the Japanese, and the tour through hell of a young Japanese soldier named Kudokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), who is overtaken by an inconvenient crisis of conscience after falling in love with prostitute Yuriko (Yuko Miyamota). Neither protagonist would be considered hero material in a traditional war film, and this is actually one of City’s key accomplishments: Lu’s meticulous depiction of the horrors of war is just set up for his exploration of the internal conflict of two men conscious of their own role in the unspeakable.

　　Sometimes Lu suddenly drops us in the middle of chaos unfolding so quickly there’s no way to find our bearings; other times he subjects us to unblinking procedurals that seem to take a moment and stretch it out the point of an endurance test. In one sequence, the heads of the camp are trying to negotiate with a few Japanese soldiers who have forced their way in, when occupators suddenly take the upper hand by swiftly murdering Tang’s daughter before his eyes. Another sequence slowly, carefully depicts the dispatching of thousands of prisoners of war via increasingly baroque methods: mass drownings, live burials, live en masse incinerations. The see-saw back and forth leads to a cumulative queasiness. The name of the game is to give the viewer a sense of the total dislocation and disorientation of war, a psychological grey zone that renders combatants and civilians caught in the crossfire equally incapable of real-world rationality. It seems as though this indoctrination process is complete by the time the Japanese soldiers break out into a surreally intense victory dance, but the scene’s controlled madness is still incredibly unnerving. Shot in silvery black and white with an epic sense of the frame, “City of Life and Death” has the feel of a lost post-War foreign classic, a masterwork implicating the viewer in the horrors of bearing witness.

　　This review was originally published during indieWIRE’s coverage of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. “City of Life and Death” opens in limited release this Wednesday, May 11th.