Friday, February 17, 2012

RAVE - Flowers of War

Nanjing was one of the earliest established cities in what is now China. In 1927, under Chiang Kai-shek, it was re-established as the capital of the Republic of China.

In 1937, Japan invaded China, beginning the second Sino-Japanese War.  

Lord knows if this representation of the Rape of Nanking is true. Having read about this chapter in the second World War, when the Japanese over-ran the city of Nanking and murdered around 300,000 of its inhabitants, it's hard to comprehend that a massacre of this scale could have happened.

Christian Bale, a self-centered mortician, arrives at a Catholic church to supervise the burial of a priest, who has long departed. Bale finds himself in a situation where he's the only adult trying to protect a group of convent girls and prostitutes from a city brothel.

It's a necessarily bleak portrait of a terrible time in China's history.

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