Dreadfully Boring

Am I Missing Something?

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The movie is set in 1930s China where the Japanese occupied China. It is a complex love story disguised as a spy thriller. I suspect the whole staging of the era and its circumstances is simply to illustrate an idea. "The idea that a new lover demands one to "kill" her old lover."What more convenient way to illustrate this than actually killing someone. But the act is merely symbolic. If the movie was set in modern times without the apparatus of physical murder, then it would take a long long time to illustrate the killing/erasing of an old love. In the movie, the main character played by Zhang Ziyi, realizes only after she has killed her old lover, she had made a grave mistake and she regrets. Only then, she realizes she loves him the most.Another interesting idea it illustrated is that -the mind and body does mysterious things. The main character betrays her true love by a cause she does not really believe. She follows the orders of a man who she doesn't really love. Strangers we are even to ourselves.

I couldn't disagree with your previous reviewer more. Purple Butterfly is a piece of majestic film-making, the first thriller I can remember since the days of Orson Welles with emotional depth and a real sense of history. The direction and cinematography are superb. Look at the railroad station sequence and the camera movement in what seems like the longest take since Antonioni's The Passenger. It is a virtuoso moment in the film. Admittedly Western audience will find the long silences and long contemplations of the actor's faces unusual, if not unsettling, but they contribute mightily to the mood and enable the actors to communicate without words. Also, it's not easy for a Westerner to distinguish between Chinese actors (sorry, but to this Westerner they did tend to look somewhat alike). Adding to the confusion is the mixture of flashbacks and forward-backs a la Tarantino. But all this just made me want to see the film a second time now that I have an inkling of what it is about. I intend to do exactly that tonight and then I'll try to find the DVD. ( I have only seen this film on cable). Also, be warned it is a very sad film. But thank God it doesn't have the usual tacked on American style optimistic ending. ( See True Romance, speaking of Tarantino.)

Claustrophobic camera angles that do not help the movie: Too long face only shots where you most of the time get the feeling that the lower half of the film is missing (that the screen is cut off), because there seems to be important actions going on, but you cannot see them. There is anyway already too much confusion in the movie, so these viewing angles make it worse and do not contribute to artful visuals. I like artfully made movies and unconventional camera work. I can handle deep and slow movies. But this one is trying too hard to be something artful and fails in my opinion painfully.Nothing to get attached to, to any of the characters, because they are not worked out well enough. To work out characters more is needed, than just minute long face shots, at least with this set of script+director+actors.I wonder whether some of the not so good acting is due to the script and director or due to the actors. I will stay away from films both written and directed by Le You for sure in the future. What an annoying film even for someone who would be interested in that part of history, and for someone who spent time in Shanghai.

"Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie)" is a Chinese take on "Charlotte Gray."There are also references to "The Third Man" in how the characters' loyalties and knowledge of each other's motives switch, to "Shanghai Express" for the trains, locales and extensive close-ups of beautiful faces, and to "Casablanca" as if these characters had more dialogue they would probably say something about their personal lives not amounting to a hill of beans amidst war breaking out in the late 1930's. Elaborate period production design and lush cinematography with very slow camera movement substitute for dialogue. I know very little of Sino-Japanese relations at this period so I probably missed important portents as the film first follows what I thought were two sets of star-crossed lovers in Manchuria and then Shanghai, whose lives only gradually obviously intersect. I consequently found some plot points confusing, particularly as I wasn't sure if the characters were spectacularly bad shots at point blank range or if we were seeing flashbacks to the point that I wondered if the projectionist had mixed up reels. I also wasn't sure if I was supposed to have a positive reaction to Tôru Nakamura's character, as the movie is so virulently anti-Japanese, but I found him a very charismatic actor who had terrific chemistry with the very expressive Ziyi Zhang despite the formalized set pieces of their interactions and even though I wasn't really sure about her personal feelings within her Mata Hari activities. It was completely gratuitous to close the movie with newsreel footage of Japanese atrocities in various Chinese cities during the war. Yes, we know this war was hell on civilians but hey I'm watching for the romances.