Purple Butterfly

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.

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.

"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.

"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.