Purple Butterfly

This starts in 1928 with a young Chinese female student and a perhaps slightly older Japanese male student in Manchuria. He is at least being groomed to promote reactionary Japanese interests prior to a war and she is just a tender thing sucked in by the more worldly man. They go to bed together before he announces he is being recalled to his own land.

Four years later the foreign conquest is underway and another love story is shown with less emphasis on sex.

Another 5 years and things are boiling. The Japanese are more or less in control and a well concealed "Purple Butterfly counter insurgent group is hard at work messing up the new regime.

The first girl is quite involved in the native movement when she sees her prewar lover returned for direct management action especially getting rid of the resistance. She now has quite mixed feelings remembering her schoolgirl love and wanting to further the protection of her country. Like a good girl she reports her finding of the Japanese boy and is taken aback when instructed to reaffirm a relationship with him to help the local cause. As this is very much a life-and death business, her quandary is interesting to watch. There is not right-or-wrong answers or even good-or-bad. Further the young Japanese man is confused whether she is a lover to be counted on or a detested spy to be destroyed. Watching this story unfold keeps the movie alive despite the desolation of the times and the destruction of war all acted out in constant downpour and dull and smoky lighting.

As much as I would also like to have seen more light and life, I am not sure the important love-hate story could have been maintained therein.

I had debated whether to pick this up at Blockbuster and am not sure I made the right choice. My heart aches for these people.

Sixth Generation Chinese director Ye Lou's visually stunning revolutionary romance "Purple Butterfly" is set in Japanese occupied Manchuria in the 1930's and for the first 45 minutes or so you may find it impossible to figure out who's who or what's going on, (I certainly did). Lou uses hand-held cameras to dizzying effect and shoots mostly in various shades of blue and with an awful lot of rain. What is clear is there is an underground organization, (the Purple Butterfly), dedicated to fighting the Japanese and that there's a traitor in their midst. Otherwise the plot is reasonably complex and the time structure not always clear while a case of mistaken identity does little to help. Nevertheless, trying to put the pieces together in some kind of logical order turns out to be hugely rewarding and, as I've said, it's visually magnificent with superb performances from the entire cast. Inevitably it will remind you of the cinema of Kar-Wai Wong but Ye Lou remains his own man and even if you need to see this a couple of times to 'get it' it will be time well spent.

Purple Butterfly began in silence, a risky one at that. It relied on the gestures of the actors/actresses, the jumpcuts, and the hand-held camera-work, reminiscent of early Italian Neo-Realism and/or Cassevettes, to begin the story. I have to admit that I dozed off somewhere within the first 30 min., but that was mainly due to my lack of sleep. Nevertheless, I was anxious for the ending of the film.

I enjoyed the cinematography, the acting style, the editing, the music, and the mixing of genres. It's like an epic espionage war love story, the likes of a collaboration between Hitchcock and Truffuat. There was some poetic scenes, and suspenseful ones as well. The main problem I had was the narrative structure which seemed confusing to me. It also didn't flow well together. Somewhere during the middle of the film, it becomes non-linear without warning me.

In conclusion, I give the movie a B-. It is definitely worth seeing and may will be a very historic film in regards to its film language in years to come.

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.

Purple Butterfly has a chaotic editing style and claustrophobic cinematography. The story line cuts back in forth from the past to the present and is hard to follow. The scenes are rainy and blurred and the cinematographer's choice of lens made some of the action blurred. This all makes Purple Butterfly seem like a bad movie, but it is suitable to the mood and story being told. Purple Butterfly is dramatic and experimental in its ways and was one of the best films at Cannes Film Festival.