For over thirty years, director Zhang Yimou has been one of his country’s most respected exports thanks to award-winning films like Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, Hero and House of Flying Daggers. When the Olympics were held in China, he was called upon to direct the opening and closing ceremonies, and to date, no other Chinese filmmaker has had more films put forward for consideration in the Oscar Foreign Language category than him.
His new film The Flowers of War moves forward in time from his previous war epics, which were set hundreds of years in China’s past, to the more recent atrocities committed by the Japanese during the invasion of Nanjing in 1937 at the beginning of World War II.
It also teams the prestigious Chinese director with a recent Oscar winner in Christian Bale, playing John Miller, an American mortician who gets caught in Nanjing during the Japanese invasion, forcing him to find shelter in a well-protected church where a group of teen schoolgirls are being kept in hiding from the invading soldiers hoping to claim them for their victory celebration. With the help of a group of boisterous local call girls, Miller disguises himself as a priest to protect the innocence of the young girls from the wartime atrocities taking place around them.
It’s already been reported that Zhang’s latest movie is the most expensive film in Chinese history, and while it includes much of the cinematic artistry that’s made the filmmaker famous throughout the world, it also has some of the sensibilities of Western war movies and wartime romance dramas. It’s also the most English we’ve seen in any films from Zhang, roughly 50%, which didn’t prevent it from becoming his 7th film put forward by China for Oscar consideration.
ComingSoon.net had a rare opportunity to sit down with the legendary Chinese filmmaker when he came to New York City for a brief visit a few months back, but before that, we have an exclusive clip from the film featuring Christian Bale.
