Few words are exchanged during the first 45 minutes of Lu Chuan's
City of Life and Death, an account of the infamous atrocities that occurred with the fall of Nanking to the Japanese in 1937. Lu confines the dialogue to barked orders, frantic cries and warrior yells from the vanquishing and vanquished. Mixing the black-and-white moral gulf of
Schindler's List with the shaky-cam "realism" of
Saving Private Ryan, the director draws out the Japanese entry into the city in such a way to create a mood of unending chaos and carnage while also emphasizing a suddenness to the breakthrough, of the KMT soldiers and civilians within the walls having anticipated the city's fall but not on such an overwhelming scale. Fortifications that repelled who knows how many enemies for centuries are reduced to rubble in seconds by Japanese tanks, and a mass panic by the leaderless KMT enlisted only leads them to the waiting arms of the surrounding invaders. Those who stand and fight only prolong the inevitable, making further pandemonium as the bodies keep falling.
City of Life and Death is not a film about the few who survived. The best comfort anyone can hope for is a quick, painless, dignified death rather than one by torture or rape, where mercy killings are the gentlest show of grace. Emphasizing the sheer vastness of the killing, the most prominent KMT fighter of the first act dies by the end of the siege, his corpse discovered by a comrade whose brief shock soon melts to numbness. And when the Japanese take total control of the city and its inhabitants, the terror only becomes more random, more incalculable. Everyone is vulnerable, and Lu introduces his primary cast of characters solely through their actions, each dealing with the takeover in his or her own way. To define them with dialogue and exposition would make them stand still to long, making them too vulnerable for any passing Japanese.
