Purple Butterfly

"Purple Butterfly" puts us in media res in a moment in history--the years leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese War--that may be unfamiliar to some viewers. It links the lives of several people tragically brought together with a time-scrambling plot, a device familiar from "Amores Perros." This combination may account for some of the impatience and confusion some viewers have expressed; but I found the film brilliant. I particularly liked the courageously (for Westerners)slow pace of many scenes--the scene at the railway station, where the protagonist (played by Zhang Ziyi) gradually moves from background to foreground, is especially good. Those looking for Hong Kong-style action will be disappointed. Those open to a humane, thoughtful twist on the intrigue genre will probably like it. Fans of Ms. Zhang from her martial arts films will have the opportunity to see her in a less stylized role.

Saw Purple Butterfly in NYC the beginning of December. I missed Xiao cheng zhi chun or Springtime in a Small Town by director Tian Zhuangzhuang shown there in early May. Quite likely Springtime is the better movie of the two by a wide margin. It's based on an earlier Chinese film according to J. Hoberman of the Village Voice: "Fei Mu's 1948 Springtime is widely regarded as a masterpiece-some consider it the greatest of all Chinese films. Never having seen it, I can only imagine how Tian may have annotated the original in his remake. The second Springtime is predicated on a sense of '50s film-making (not unlike the heightened Sirkness of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven) that could hardly have existed in the original. Even as homage, Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave." Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the Fei Mu Springtime as "widely considered the nation's greatest film by Mandarin speakers but tragically neglected by almost everyone else" and ends his capsule review of the new Springtime, "This erotically charged drama may not be quite as great as the original, but it's an amazing and beautiful work just the same." I no doubt need to add this to my 2004 "Wish I'd Seen" list. (Thanks to my colleagues on another film world website for bringing it to my attention in the House of Flying Daggers thread there).

Well, it's clear to me that Purple Butterfly isn't of this magnitude but it's notably different from the usual Chinese film fare in focusing on political conflicts in the 1930's -- which are handled in a somewhat conspiratorial and noirish way, with romance woven in. There are lots of long stares, Thirties dance songs, non-filter cigarettes pensively lighted with box matches, and events in Shanghai in the period of Japanese occupation leading up to the Sino-Japanese war involving political activist plots and counter-plots that are filmed to look rather like blurry, chaotic versions of Chicago gangster shootouts. There is a tragic star-crossed love story, and the climactic scene is rather neat. But the director, Lou Ye, isn't satisfied but has to add a disenchanted brutal sex/self doubt coda.

The director's previous film was Suzhou River, and this is just as pretty to look at -- pretty enough so you almost don't care that at first you don't know what's happening, except that couples are inarticulately in love and it's always raining. The Village Voice thumbnail review aptly commented, "part action flick, part love story, and part posh historical pageant...a fabulously morose piece of work." Purple Butterfly calls a bit too much attention to itself to fully evoke its Thirties setting, but it manages to seem original most of the way despite occasional debts to Wong Kar Wai notable in the long pauses, languid love scenes, and incessant rain. Not a great success, but watchable as a mood piece.

Metacritic score of Purple Butterfly: 66.

Metacritic score of Springtime in a Small Town: 86.

"Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie)" is a Chinese take on "Charlotte Gray."

There are also references to "The Third Man" in how the characters' loyalties and knowledge of each other's motives switch, to "Shanghai Express" for the trains, locales and extensive close-ups of beautiful faces, and to "Casablanca" as if these characters had more dialogue they would probably say something about their personal lives not amounting to a hill of beans amidst war breaking out in the late 1930's.

Elaborate period production design and lush cinematography with very slow camera movement substitute for dialogue.

I know very little of Sino-Japanese relations at this period so I probably missed important portents as the film first follows what I thought were two sets of star-crossed lovers in Manchuria and then Shanghai, whose lives only gradually obviously intersect.

I consequently found some plot points confusing, particularly as I wasn't sure if the characters were spectacularly bad shots at point blank range or if we were seeing flashbacks to the point that I wondered if the projectionist had mixed up reels.

I also wasn't sure if I was supposed to have a positive reaction to Tôru Nakamura's character, as the movie is so virulently anti-Japanese, but I found him a very charismatic actor who had terrific chemistry with the very expressive Ziyi Zhang despite the formalized set pieces of their interactions and even though I wasn't really sure about her personal feelings within her Mata Hari activities.

It was completely gratuitous to close the movie with newsreel footage of Japanese atrocities in various Chinese cities during the war. Yes, we know this war was hell on civilians but hey I'm watching for the romances.

There are a few things director Ye Lou likes more than I do: silent, open-mouthed screams, rain and quick dissolves. His movie Purple Butterfly is composed mainly of these things, with glimpses in-between of a story about two lovers caught up in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria during the '30s.

I know what I'm supposed to think of this movie: it's a tone-poem, an evocation of some deeper mood, something running below the surface of the action. But I can't help feeling that the whole exercise would've been more worthwhile had the director demonstrated less ambition and more good old-fashioned story-sense.

There are these two people, one a Chinese woman working for the underground, the other a Japanese fellow toiling for his country's secret-service. We know they're lovers because we see them in bed together, but for at least half the movie, we have no real idea who these people are, what their roles are in the drama that appears to be playing out before us. Now, I'm no dummy, and certainly don't require everything to be spelled-out for me in the dopey terms of most Hollywood movies, but I do appreciate it when the director makes at least a cursory effort at filling me in on the details of the story, like who people are and why I should care about them.

The movie doesn't let you get a food-hold, it's too busy being poetic and rainy and surpassingly glum. This might be all right if the images had some great plastic beauty, but the blue-toned pictures Ye Lou puts in front of us, dissolving from one to the next like he's putting on a museum slide-show of Chinese history, are not exactly the best eye-candy I've seen lately. As an exercise in image and cutting the film is not hall-of-fame material.

The stuff of good cinema is there in Purple Butterfly, but it's buried under too many layers of Cinema.

Many have commented on how confusing the film's plot is, and I agreed on first viewing. A second viewing, however, shows everything quite intricately and deftly and =coherently= composed. People are used to films telling them things with words, which a visual medium doesn't necessarily have to do. The images give you everything here, provided you're paying attention, which shouldn't be too much for a director to ask. The first 20 minutes play out almost like a silent movie, as Lou uses the most delicately suggestive fragments to introduce us to the star-crossed lovers Itami (Toru Nakamura) and Cynthia (Zhang Ziyi). Zhang, in my opinion, deserves every close-up she gets.