Zi hudie (2003)

Director:

Ye Lou

Writer:

Ye Lou (writer)

Release Date:

17 September 2004 (Greece)

Genre:

Drama | History | War

Plot:

Ding Hui is a member of Purple Butterfly, a powerful resistance group in Japanese occupied Shanghai...

Plot Keywords:

Shanghai | Japanese | Beautiful Woman | Japan | Sino Japanese War

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Ziyi Zhang	...	Cynthia / Ding Hui (as Zhang Ziyi)
Ye Liu	...	Situ (Szeto)
Yuanzheng Feng	...	Xie Ming
Tôru Nakamura	...	Hidehiko Itami
Bingbing Li	...	Tang Yiling
Kin Ei	...	Yamamoto
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Sciichiro Hashimoto

Also Known As:

Purple Butterfly (International: English title)

MPAA:

Rated R for strong violence and a scene of sexuality.

Runtime:

France:127 min (Cannes Film Festival) | USA:127 min

Country:

China | France

Language:

Mandarin | Japanese | Vietnamese

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Australia:MA (TV rating) | Malaysia:18SG | Singapore:M18 | USA:R

Company:

Dream Factory

Soundtrack:

The Moon Of A Garden Bridge

Slow pace and incoherent historical drama

Lethargic direction ruins an otherwise compelling period story that stars the wondrous Zhang Ziyi, in an excellent role as a woman who joins an extremist group in 1928 China, just prior to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and reunites with a former lover who is now working for Japan. Every bit of drama and forward motion of the story is sucked dry by director Ye Lou's somnambulist directorial style. Characters stand still staring at each other for long minutes, saying nothing, hand-held cameras hold forever on faces showing interminable reactions way longer than they need to, edits repeat the same reaction is triple redundancy. We know nothing about the characters as the story begins and are given little new information as the story progresses, only silence and static shots of lovers who don't speak, who interaction through silent dances but share no apparent emotional intimacy. A very sleep inducing film.