Nanking

[rating:4.5]
Director: Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman
Starring: Nanking survivors, Japanese military veterans, Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Stephen Dorff, Jurgen Prochnow

Killing time in the theater before the screening of Nanking started, I jotted the outline of a pithy opening for this review. It would have been to the effect that it’s nice to hear about an invading army’s atrocities and violations of human rights and at least know the army isn’t ours. Levity and black humor pretty much die on the tongue—or the typing fingers—after watching Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman’s amazing documentary about the 1937 destruction of the then-capital of China, an incident known everywhere except Japan as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking.

A documentary of this sort of sobering horror, History Channel material, is not typical Badmouth fodder, but I confess a personal interest. I lived in Japan for 2 ½ years in the ’90s and observed a grotesquely fascinating political phenomenon. It seemed that every six months, without being prompted, a cabinet-level official in Tokyo would publicly pronounce that the Nanking Massacre was a lie or a gross exaggeration, or say the victims of the “comfort women” brothels—many still living—had “serviced” Japanese soldiers willingly in a humane environment. If at all. China, Korea and the Philippines would lead a pan-Asian chorus of bitter protest, and the imprudent, impudent minister would be forced to resign. And six months later, another cabinet monkey would fling the same offensive shit. It was so pathetic as to be, in a way, darkly amusing, but in the Bush era, where repeating the lie very nearly manufactures it as truth, such denials are distinctly more dark, less amusing.

Nanking has such compelling subject matter that it might take astonishingly incompetent filmmakers to not produce a moving documentary on the subject, but the directors do more than serve their material; they elevate it with unassuming artistry. The film opens with what looks like a buffet, and soberly dressed actors sit down in a row on stiff wooden chairs. In unflinching closeup, they introduce themselves as Americans (and a German, embodied by Jurgen Prochnow) and proceed to read their parts, consisting entirely of the letters and diaries of the missionaries, doctors and businessmen who were in Nanking when the Japanese invaded China. Newsreel clips, grainy black-and-white footage of a city lost to time and war, intersperses their initial descriptions of a thriving city, and at first we might assume that this is a random assemblage of honkies, the white folks whose journals happened to survive the decades to provide our filmmakers their authentic material—the on-the-spot bloggers of their era. We might even bitterly assume that the filmmakers are putting a Western face on their story to make their film more palatable to a Western audience. We’d be very wrong on both counts.

When an actor reads his part, a title appears at the bottom of the screen, identifying the person he or she represents. After some footage of happy Nanking, and then of flying Japanese bombers, the camera cuts to elderly Chinese men and women, identified at the top of the screen as actual Nanking survivors, their ages in 1937—22, 17, 14, 12, 9—given. The Japanese first assault Shanghai, and I was amazed at the newsreel footage. We see nothing nearly so graphic and compelling today as countless horrors and wars are perpetrated globally in a so-called Information Age. The survivors and the actors recount the approach of the Japanese army to Nanking, describe the flight of anyone in the city who had the money to leave, and then the shelling of the rest as the invaders approach the city walls. Slowly we realize that the Western diarists are becoming a tight-knit group of amazing heroes.

As the Japanese approached, this handful of ministers, medics and merchants petitioned the invading government to create a refugee safe zone within the city. Denied permission, they do so anyway. Thousands crowd into a two-square-mile (if my notes serve) area as the Japanese arrive. The accounts are gripping. A Westerner describes the shelling that occurs after the Japanese take up positions outside the city. The bombs exploded “in regular rows, advancing 25 yards every half minute.” The Japanese entered the city, and we return to an old man who was in his teens that day. He describes his family’s encounter with the invaders. His mother and infant brother are bayonetted by Japanese troops. Seventy years later he still falls to tears, his nose running, as he describes the scene in appallingly vivid detail, leaning toward the camera as he describes his mother, unable to speak, choking on her last breaths. The story continues, so overloaded with tragedy you’d never be able to accept it in fiction.

About now, the film brings in actual Japanese soldiers, too. Some shot apparently recently, others clearly in aging film from some decades ago. They describe calmly how executions were handled. One says, with so many prisoners and no way to care for them, they “didn’t really have any other option.” One veteran seems to chuckle, dragging on his cigarette as he describes how Chinese men were bound together before being shot or bayonetted. Another describes the executions through careful placement of prisoners and gunmen: “It was easy to dispose of thousands at a time. I don’t think it took more than 30 minutes.” Yet another seems remorseless as he describes drawing straws to see which girl would next be gangraped over the agonized pleas of her parents. While surely anyone here might be the victim of selective editing, this old man’s sole presented aspect of remorse is to observe that the rapes weren’t really worth much, in the end: “Unless the two of you are both into it, these things are no good.”

The heartbreaking tales don’t stop, and the audience is sniffling all around, and gasping in shock at new incidents. A wizened woman in her early eighties describes how, at age 12, she shaved off her hair, impersonating a boy, to avoid being selected out of a lineup to be a rape victim—a ploy that works, but not for long. Photos are shown, a young woman’s corpse, left nude, legs splayed wide, amid rubble. One of our Westerners describes smuggling film, shot in the hospital within the slightly misnamed Safety Zone, out to the West to show the horrors of Nanking’s destruction. Then we are shown clips of the film itself, silent reels of doctors’ hands pointing to the bandaged—or not—wounds of patients as text titles relate facts that identify, say, a man burned with gasoline, or a woman raped and stabbed 27, 29 times.

The film begins with no hint of what is to come, and ends with no context being given. The place of this horrific incident in the scope of Japan’s aggression, or the entirety of World War II, is not provided, which is arguably an oversight. Still, what it lacks in historic sweep it makes up for in wrenching detail. It is simply a moving, masterfully assembled account of humanity at its nadir. It would be one of the most moving episode of a series of films about the war in the Pacific, but on its own it suffers slightly from being divorced from the bigger picture.

Astonishingly, several of the survivors recall the heroic protectors of the Safety Zone, the Westerners being portrayed by actors, and describe them movingly. Facts, at a certain point, begin to blur. Twenty thousand women raped. In the first month. About 250,000 people saved in the Safety Zone. A man describes his teenaged sister being split in two with a bayonet. War criminals blamed for the Nanjing massacres interred in Tokyo’s most celebrated military shrine. The post-Nanjing circumstances of the Westerners are given, many of them grim. My notes taper off, information gliding by, because beyond a certain point, too much of my effort was focused on the measured breathing that might let me fight the rest of the movie, to get through without breaking down into unrestrained tears.

Nanking apparently went into limited release in December, and is just now rolling out into other markets. It’s worth seeking out.

Tags: drama