The Darling Of Red China Communism Makes Film With Phoney Jesuit As Central Role

Zhang Yimou directs Christian Bale in The Flowers of War

The international trailer for Zhang Yimou’s war drama The Flowers of War (formerly 13 Flowers of Nanjing) has gone online.  Christian Bale stars as a Jesuit priest in a story about a group of people who take refuge inside a cathedral as the invading Japanese Imperial Army takes over Nanking in 1937.  If you want any further clarification on that plot, the trailer may not help you out.  Whereas most trailer we see provide some kind of narrative or over-arching theme, this one is a mish-mash of important scenes that don’t seem to have any particular order. 

In one scene Bale is acting heroic and responsible and in another he’s drunk and looking for whores 

and it’s tough to see how he got from A to B.  Yimou looks like he’s pulled off some interesting battles that almost look like he’s trying to blend the wuxia style of his Hero with the gritty war-is-hell cinematography of a movie like Saving Private Ryan.

Link (here) to Collider.com

Darling Comment (here)

The real story of Jesuit heroism of Fr. Robert de Besange, S.J. at the Nanking Massacre (here) Father saved over a 500,000 Chinese lives with his safety zones.
Who is Chiang Kai-shek? Go (here)

Who is Mao Zedong? Go (here)  

Read about the Chinese Civil War (here)

Read about the Chinese Cultural Revolution (here)

Read about the Chinese One Child Policy (here)
Blogger note: The Christian  Bale character is supposedly to be an American pretending to be a Jesuit.