Impressive visual effects in this story of John Rabe, a German businessman running the Siemens factory in Nanking, China, as the city is first threatened, then occupied and its residents brutalized by the Japanese Army in 1937.
Along with a handful of other internationals, Rabe is instrumental in forming a committee to operate the factory as a "safety zone" in which women and children are safe from the invading soldiers. His credentials as a German citizen, a formal ally of Japan, is one of his most important contributions to the task. It works, more or less, but not without suspenseful hitches.
Not too much is shown of what the soldiers did to the citizens of Nanking, which is all for the good. Nobody would believe it. Three hundred thousand Chinese died at the time. That would be about half the population of contemporary San Francisco. The Chinese were eliminated wholesale and in a disorganized and whimsical way. Some of the living were used as bayonet practice targets. How does a culture that promotes such delicate arts as bonsai and origami, that is so terribly polite, manage to tolerate such brutality in its military? Nobody knows. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict tried to explain it in terms of the difference between "shame" and "guilt."
At any rate, the cast varies in the way it fits the characters. John Rabe is played by Ulrich Tukur, the nominal hero, and he couldn't be a better choice -- distant, formal, and yet as mousy as Donald Pleasance with a mustache would have been. Anne Consigny as the French school mistress is strikingly beautiful and gives a fine performance. Steve Buscemi is, at first, the undiplomatically brash American doctor who hates Rabe for his Teutonic background but eventually learns to respect and admire him. Buscemi doesn't seem to belong. With his pale face, bulging eyeballs, and shark-like incisors, he looks more like Dracula than a doctor, and he sounds as if he just ran away from a Quentin Tarantino set.
In a way it's a formula movie, rather like "Schindler's List", the kind of movie that wins awards. For the most part, the good guys are attractive and the bad guys are ugly. A handful of high-status types band together at the risk of their own lives to save several thousand Chinese. Certain select Japanese officers are clearly the villains but there's even a "good Japanese" who passes on warnings in an attempt to prevent more mass murders. The happy ending is requisite.
But it's a moving story. How could it not be?
Along with a handful of other internationals, Rabe is instrumental in forming a committee to operate the factory as a "safety zone" in which women and children are safe from the invading soldiers. His credentials as a German citizen, a formal ally of Japan, is one of his most important contributions to the task. It works, more or less, but not without suspenseful hitches.
Not too much is shown of what the soldiers did to the citizens of Nanking, which is all for the good. Nobody would believe it. Three hundred thousand Chinese died at the time. That would be about half the population of contemporary San Francisco. The Chinese were eliminated wholesale and in a disorganized and whimsical way. Some of the living were used as bayonet practice targets. How does a culture that promotes such delicate arts as bonsai and origami, that is so terribly polite, manage to tolerate such brutality in its military? Nobody knows. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict tried to explain it in terms of the difference between "shame" and "guilt."
At any rate, the cast varies in the way it fits the characters. John Rabe is played by Ulrich Tukur, the nominal hero, and he couldn't be a better choice -- distant, formal, and yet as mousy as Donald Pleasance with a mustache would have been. Anne Consigny as the French school mistress is strikingly beautiful and gives a fine performance. Steve Buscemi is, at first, the undiplomatically brash American doctor who hates Rabe for his Teutonic background but eventually learns to respect and admire him. Buscemi doesn't seem to belong. With his pale face, bulging eyeballs, and shark-like incisors, he looks more like Dracula than a doctor, and he sounds as if he just ran away from a Quentin Tarantino set.
In a way it's a formula movie, rather like "Schindler's List", the kind of movie that wins awards. For the most part, the good guys are attractive and the bad guys are ugly. A handful of high-status types band together at the risk of their own lives to save several thousand Chinese. Certain select Japanese officers are clearly the villains but there's even a "good Japanese" who passes on warnings in an attempt to prevent more mass murders. The happy ending is requisite.
But it's a moving story. How could it not be?