cinémathèque
In the past, I watched a movie every couple of weeks - roughly twenty-five movies per annum. I think I've watched at least that many movies in the last six weeks. My movie intake has substantially increased thanks to a roommate who watches movies like other people listen to music. While he works with movies playing in the background, I get sucked in and, voila!, I find myself watching yet another movie.
Of the movies that I've watched in the past months, a few stand out. Inglorious Bastards, Moon, and Empire of the Sun rise to the top of the list. I hadn't seen the first two movies before, but I had seen Empire of the Sun and watching it a second time confirmed for me what a great movie it is.
Christian Bale, who was thirteen when the movie was made in 1987, and John Malkovich are great in their respective roles, but the cinematography, the story, and the themes underlying the story ultimately steal the show and resonated with me (this might have something to do with my affinity for books and movies set in historical China and Japan).
Empire of the Sun provides a captivating perspective of the occupation of China by the Japanese in WWII. Elements of the war are relayed to the audience through the eyes of a rich, spoiled foreign boy who is suddenly transplanted to an environment where his affluence and status become instantaneously irrelevant yet his sense of entitlement takes time to fade. His childhood innocence evaporates rapidly in the POW camp and is replaced with a cocky adolescent naiveté that is simultaneously endearing and exasperating. I found this paragraph from a 1988 article in the New York Times to be quite interesting:
''I was attracted to the main character being a child,'' says Mr. Spielberg [...]. ''But I was also attracted to the idea that this was a death of innocence, not an attenuation of childhood [...]. This was the opposite of 'Peter Pan.' This was a boy who had grown up too quickly, who was becoming a flower long before the bud had ever come out of the topsoil. And, in fact, a flower that was a gifted weed.''
I also appreciated the humanity instilled on the Japanese as a result of telling the story from the standpoint of a boy whose outlook hasn't been tainted by political rhetoric and wartime propaganda. Rather than being a black-and-white war story of good-versus-evil, the lines are blurred and the audience is left having to reconcile with various shades of grey. The subtly clever title alludes to the ambiguity by combining Japan's "land of the rising sun" with the idea that "the sun never sets on the British Empire".
