The Flowers of War Review

Few directors stage a street battle as well as Zhang Yimou does in the first twenty minutes, where Major Li and a handful of soldiers use smoke, rubble and their own bodies to stop a tank column, and Zhao Xiaoding keeps the geography legible through all the dust and broken light. Then the film shuts itself inside a cathedral and stalls. Christian Bale turns up as a mortician who drinks, gropes and demands payment, and his conversion into a protector arrives on schedule rather than out of anything in the performance, partly because the English dialogue reads like a first draft nobody revised.

Ni Ni is better than the picture deserves as Yu Mo, and the scene where the courtesans cut their hair to take the schoolgirls' place has a hard beauty the surrounding melodrama has not earned. The colour scheme is the real argument: jade and crimson silk moving through a grey ruin, stained glass blowing apart in slow motion. It is gorgeous, and it is also a way of turning a massacre into an opera. A film about Nanjing that needs a white man to organise the audience's sympathy has chosen the wrong door into its subject.