CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (Lu Chuan, 2009)

dance critic and cineaste Mindy Aloff has graciously contributed this entry

From China and Hong Kong, this Homeric black-and-white feature, originally titled Nanjing! Nanjing!, dramatizes the Japanese army’s 1937-38 invasion and destruction of what was then China’s capital city, an event sometimes referred to as “the rape of Nanking,” one of the twentieth century’s most horrific massacres of combatants and civilians, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. For those who have read the 1997 history by Iris Chang (or even the Wikipedia page on the subject), the picture will seem somewhat sanitized as reporting. The invaders engaged in an orgy of atrocities—documented by eyewitnesses in journals, letters, photographs, and even some film—against what was essentially a defenseless population, the city having been abandoned and the surrounding environs scorched for strategic reasons by the Chinese general Chiang Kai-shek. Lu Chuan, who wrote as well as directed the movie, his fourth feature, was subject to governmental censorship, and China’s own role in leaving the city so vulnerable goes unremarked.
     Even so, Chuan’s is a brave film as well as a stunningly well-made one. Its cinematography (Cao Yu) and editing (Teng Yu) approach the optical power of early Russian silents; however, the story’s emotional power stems from Lu’s scenario and handling of people, his magnificent balance of crowds against individuals. And his piercingly laconic script permits the brilliant actors an array of counterintuitive choices in their gestures and nuanced expressions, which, in context, read as complexities verging on paradox. A husband’s broad smile becomes an icon of tragedy. A soldier’s boyish enthusiasm at seeing a beautiful girl becomes an icon of butchery. A man sitting in a field of vibrant flowers becomes a horrific realization of inhumanity. Every element tells. A single note of a querulous flute makes one’s blood run quite, quite cold.

AT LONG LAST LOVE (Peter Bogdanovich, 1975)

For me, the two highlights of the 1970s phase of Peter Bogdanovich’s filmmaking career are At Long Last Love starring then-lover and muse Cybill Shepherd and the gritty, atmospheric post-Cybill Saint Jack (1979) starring wonderful Ben Gazzara. A financial flop in its day, the first of these has often been ridiculed, as though writer-director Bogdanovich didn’t know what the hell he was doing in making a musical romance set to music and lyrics by Cole Porter. With the passing years, though, Bogdanovich’s assurance and his film’s poignant charm have become clearer. The film is a sumptuous, stylish feast of those delicate feelings that infuse sexual love’s volatility in the shadow of mortal anxiety. In a way, At Long Last Love is Bogdanovich’s version of Victorian poet Robert Browning’s “Two in the Campagna.”
     The silken white Art Deco sets evoke the 1930s of Astaire & Rogers, to be precise, Top Hat (1935)—but as Ernst Lubitsch rather than Mark Sandrich might have directed it. Although it is set in a single time and a unified space, the film conjures the exquisite ache of impermanence and time lost of Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait (1943).
     A comedy of errors, the deliberately slight plot of Top Hat, based on misidentification, expresses the ambiguous and elusive, if overwhelming, nature of romantic love, including its potential for evaporation and reformulation. “Change partners and come dance with me,” Astaire sings to Rogers in another Irving Berlin musical, Carefree (1938). Applying the non-narrative tendencies of Michelangelo Antonioni’s great cinema to the musical-comedy-romance genre, At Long Last Love has even less plot than Top Hat, creating instead a sublime, haunting limbo of desire and atmospherics where the gentlemen in two couples—one is a rich playboy, the other a gambler, whose fortunes may thus change—end poised in the direction of each other’s partner, their own original partner, on a posh dance floor. In reality, romance is an illusion, a seeming permanence cloaking a spirit of dalliance, as the whimsical shot of a mirror’s reflection suggests.
     Shepherd’s Brooke Carter is goddessy and composed, bittersweetly ironical, and practiced and innocent in equal measures at roughly the same time. It’s a grand performance, perhaps closer to ones by Myrna Loy and thirties Bette Davis than to Ginger Rogers. As a singer, Shepherd is no Merman, as a dancer, no Hayworth; but she is surprisingly good as both. In his heart and mind, this viewer found himself holding on to her for dear life.