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Purple Butterfly

2003, Movie, R, 127 mins

Purple Butterfly: Review

PURPLE BUTTERFLY | ZI HUDIE
starstarstarstar
Like his moody, leisurely SUZHOU RIVER (2000), Chinese director Lou Ye's wartime thriller prizes mood over straightforward storytelling and creates a damp, oppressive atmosphere that almost seems to cling to the skin. Manchuria, 1928: Amid growing hostility towards Japanese influence in Northeastern China, foreign student Hidehiko Itami (Toru Nakamura) boards a Tokyo-bound train after a bittersweet parting with his Chinese girlfriend, fellow student Cynthia (Zhang Ziyi). She returns home just in time to see her journalist brother, whose paper has decried Japanese incursions into China, murdered by a Japanese right-wing extremist. Three years later, Cynthia has moved to Shanghai, which is unofficially occupied by the Japanese. Now calling herself Ding Hui, Cynthia belongs to a resistance group called Purple Butterfly. She and her comrades have staked out the main train station to pick up the assassin they've hired to kill Mr. Yamamoto (Kin Ei), head of the Shanghai branch of the Japanese secret service. Unbeknownst to the Purple Butterfly contingent, a traitor within the organization has tipped off the Japanese, who've sent their own gunmen. At the same time, a young woman named Yi Ling (Li Bingbing) is arriving to meet her boyfriend, Szeto (Liu Ye). Both groups mistake Szeto for the hired killer and gunfire erupts; when the smoke clears Ding Hui has killed Yi Ling and the hapless Szeto has been arrested by the Japanese. Soon after, Itami arrives in Shanghai to relieve Yamamoto and root out the scourge of Purple Butterfly; he orders Szeto's release in hopes that Szeto will lead him to the resistance fighters. Meanwhile Purple Butterfly's commander, Xie Ming (Feng Yuanzheng), asks Ding Hui to reestablish ties with Itami in hopes of getting closer to Yamamoto. The lovers resume their affair, but it's shrouded in a fog of mutual distrust and suspicion, and further complicated by the fact that Xie Ming and Ding Hui were once lovers and he remains deeply in thrall to her. Lou Ye's Shanghai is cloaked in perpetual rain and he alternates long, melancholy shots — often wordless and underscored by sweet period pop songs — with short bursts of rapid fire montage; tranquil scenes are similarly disrupted by spasms of bloody violence. The effect is hypnotically disorienting, but the less familiar you are with this period in 20th-century Chinese history, the easier it is to get hopelessly lost in the tangle of personal and political loyalties and betrayals. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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