La triade du papillon

Sixth Generation Chinese director Ye Lou's visually stunning revolutionary romance "Purple Butterfly" is set in Japanese occupied Manchuria in the 1930's and for the first 45 minutes or so you may find it impossible to figure out who's who or what's going on, (I certainly did). Lou uses hand-held cameras to dizzying effect and shoots mostly in various shades of blue and with an awful lot of rain. What is clear is there is an underground organization, (the Purple Butterfly), dedicated to fighting the Japanese and that there's a traitor in their midst. Otherwise the plot is reasonably complex and the time structure not always clear while a case of mistaken identity does little to help. Nevertheless, trying to put the pieces together in some kind of logical order turns out to be hugely rewarding and, as I've said, it's visually magnificent with superb performances from the entire cast. Inevitably it will remind you of the cinema of Kar-Wai Wong but Ye Lou remains his own man and even if you need to see this a couple of times to 'get it' it will be time well spent.

Many have commented on how confusing the film's plot is, and I agreed on first viewing. A second viewing, however, shows everything quite intricately and deftly and =coherently= composed. People are used to films telling them things with words, which a visual medium doesn't necessarily have to do. The images give you everything here, provided you're paying attention, which shouldn't be too much for a director to ask. The first 20 minutes play out almost like a silent movie, as Lou uses the most delicately suggestive fragments to introduce us to the star-crossed lovers Itami (Toru Nakamura) and Cynthia (Zhang Ziyi). Zhang, in my opinion, deserves every close-up she gets.

This starts in 1928 with a young Chinese female student and a perhaps slightly older Japanese male student in Manchuria. He is at least being groomed to promote reactionary Japanese interests prior to a war and she is just a tender thing sucked in by the more worldly man. They go to bed together before he announces he is being recalled to his own land.

Four years later the foreign conquest is underway and another love story is shown with less emphasis on sex.

Another 5 years and things are boiling. The Japanese are more or less in control and a well concealed "Purple Butterfly counter insurgent group is hard at work messing up the new regime.

The first girl is quite involved in the native movement when she sees her prewar lover returned for direct management action especially getting rid of the resistance. She now has quite mixed feelings remembering her schoolgirl love and wanting to further the protection of her country. Like a good girl she reports her finding of the Japanese boy and is taken aback when instructed to reaffirm a relationship with him to help the local cause. As this is very much a life-and death business, her quandary is interesting to watch. There is not right-or-wrong answers or even good-or-bad. Further the young Japanese man is confused whether she is a lover to be counted on or a detested spy to be destroyed. Watching this story unfold keeps the movie alive despite the desolation of the times and the destruction of war all acted out in constant downpour and dull and smoky lighting.

As much as I would also like to have seen more light and life, I am not sure the important love-hate story could have been maintained therein.

I had debated whether to pick this up at Blockbuster and am not sure I made the right choice. My heart aches for these people.

There are a few things director Ye Lou likes more than I do: silent, open-mouthed screams, rain and quick dissolves. His movie Purple Butterfly is composed mainly of these things, with glimpses in-between of a story about two lovers caught up in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria during the '30s.

I know what I'm supposed to think of this movie: it's a tone-poem, an evocation of some deeper mood, something running below the surface of the action. But I can't help feeling that the whole exercise would've been more worthwhile had the director demonstrated less ambition and more good old-fashioned story-sense.

There are these two people, one a Chinese woman working for the underground, the other a Japanese fellow toiling for his country's secret-service. We know they're lovers because we see them in bed together, but for at least half the movie, we have no real idea who these people are, what their roles are in the drama that appears to be playing out before us. Now, I'm no dummy, and certainly don't require everything to be spelled-out for me in the dopey terms of most Hollywood movies, but I do appreciate it when the director makes at least a cursory effort at filling me in on the details of the story, like who people are and why I should care about them.

The movie doesn't let you get a food-hold, it's too busy being poetic and rainy and surpassingly glum. This might be all right if the images had some great plastic beauty, but the blue-toned pictures Ye Lou puts in front of us, dissolving from one to the next like he's putting on a museum slide-show of Chinese history, are not exactly the best eye-candy I've seen lately. As an exercise in image and cutting the film is not hall-of-fame material.

The stuff of good cinema is there in Purple Butterfly, but it's buried under too many layers of Cinema.

Purple Butterfly has a chaotic editing style and claustrophobic cinematography. The story line cuts back in forth from the past to the present and is hard to follow. The scenes are rainy and blurred and the cinematographer's choice of lens made some of the action blurred. This all makes Purple Butterfly seem like a bad movie, but it is suitable to the mood and story being told. Purple Butterfly is dramatic and experimental in its ways and was one of the best films at Cannes Film Festival.