PURPLE RAIN
Saw Purple Butterfly at the Siskel on Friday night. A certain Ms. Vivian C. Wong was in attendance with me. The film appears to have been released in China in 2003, but is only now being distributed in the U.S.
Plot: In late 1920s Shangahi, Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) is romantically involved with Itami (Nakamura Tooru), a Japanese man. Very early on in the film, Itami leaves Shanghai to return to Japan. They both appear saddened by the occasion, but do not make any grand gestures to each other. Ding Hui doesn't even say good-bye to him at the train station. Their lack of direct communication with each other actually suggets that their feelings are more intense and deeper than we understand. Soon after Itami leaves, Ding Hui watches as her brother is brutally murdered by a Japanese nationalist.
The film jumps to 1931. Ding Hui has joined Purple Butterfly, a violent, anti-Japanese group and Itami has returned to Shanghai as part of Japanese intelligence. His mission is to find and destroy people like Ding Hui. Her fellow members of Purple Butterfly realize that Ding Hui used to be involved with Itami and ask her to get close to him once again. They want information from Itami that will lead them to Yamamoto, the head of Japanese intelligence in Shanghai. Ding Hui agrees to meet Itami again.
Sounds pretty melodramatic, right? Well, it's not. Purple Butterfly is a subtle, harrowing film, more interested in recording moments in the lives of its characters than in thrilling us with its plot contrivances. The director, Ye Lou, does not appear interested in making a conventional, historical film with lots of impressive sets and costumes filmed in stately long shots. Instead, everyone in the film wears drab, threadbare clothes and Shanghai appears to be a city of grime and constant rain. The director shows us the ordinary people buried under the weight of history.
In fact, the film does not present history as a coherent and easily understandable series of facts, but daringly chooses to present many of its incidents in a non-linear form. There are flashbacks and flashforwards and even flashsideways. Some might see this choice of a fractured narrative as art-house pretension, I saw it as an attempt by the director to demonstrate what the chaos of the time must have felt like to the people that lived it. At times, the action is almost unintelligible, but you wonder if events appeared that way to the people living in Shanghai during the Japanese Occupation.
There actually isn't much of a plot to Purple Butterfly, it's more a series of incidents that creates a mood of a time and a place. The characters circle each other warily, each trying to figure out what the other wants, their maneuvers only interrupted by sudden, terrifying bursts of violence. Indeed, Purple Butterfly is an extremely violent film, but it uses violence in the best possible way that a film can. I never felt excited or amused by the violence, only sickened and saddened.
The film builds to a confrontation between the two leads that literally gave me chills and then moves on to a final flashback that recasts and deepens all the preceding events. I've never really before understood what people see in Zhang Ziyi, she's seemed like the Chinese version of Winona Ryder to me, (that's not as big a put-down as it sounds), but she gives a remarkable performance throughout Purple Butterfly. As there isn't a lot of dialogue in the film, she has to do most of her acting with her eyes and her body, and she succeeds splendidly. It won't be easy to forget the look on her face near the end of the film when crucial information is revealed to her character.
I don't know if there's really a message to Purple Butterfly, perhaps just that fate can be remarkably cruel, particularly in times of war. People that otherwise might have been able to lead quiet, peaceful lives are destroyed for no greater reason than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.