Unlikely hero of wartime
Mortician turns protector during invasion of Shanghai
In 1987, 13-year-old Christian Bale played a young English boy caught up in the 1941 Japanese invasion of Shanghai. The Flowers
of War brings him back to live out the infamous Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing, which took place in 1937.
The historical record, told in numerous features and documentaries, includes efforts by Western entrepreneurs, doctors and missionaries to safeguard the citizens. In one of history’s great ironies, a Nazi businessman named John Rabe helped organize the Nanjing Safety Zone, which saved thousands of lives. The Flowers of War, directed
by Yimou Zhang ( House of Flying Daggers), tells a more modest but still moving story, adapted from Geling Yan’s novel, The
13 Flowers of Nanjing. Bale plays John Miller, an American mortician dispatched to bury the priest at a girl’s convent. He arrives just as Japanese forces storm the city, and winds up taking shelter with a gaggle of students and their ineffectual young chaperon, George.
John’s first thought is to get paid and get out. “It’s a Catholic Church; there’s gotta be some cash inside,” he insists over George’s protests to the contrary. When the sanctuary is next breached by a bevy of prostitutes, led by the sultry Englishspeaking Yu Mo (Ni Ni), he starts to reconsider. In many ways, The Flowers of
War mirrors the recent Holocaust film, In Darkness, in which a Polish sewer worker harbours Jewish refugees, first for monetary gain, but eventually, because it’s the right thing to do. Like that character, John’s conversion is aided when he witnesses acts of horrible violence, including the attempted rape and murder of the schoolgirls.
His decision to don the robes of the priest and order the soldiers to leave buys him a little time, but it also convinces him that a Western clergyman might be the only thing that can save the unlikely collection of females under this roof.
Bale shows that he hasn’t lost his childlike ability to carry a story about conflict in the Far East.