Purple Butterfly (2003) Zi hudie (original title)

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 | Japan | Japanese Versus Chinese | Beautiful Woman

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

Directed by
Ye Lou

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Ye Lou		writer

Produced by
Alain de la Mata	....	executive producer
Ye Lou	....	producer
Vincent Maraval	....	executive producer
An Nai	....	co-executive producer
Jean-Louis Piel	....	executive producer
Wang Wei	....	producer
Zheng Zhong	....	co-executive producer
Yongde Zhu	....	producer
Wu Zhuo	....	co-executive producer

Original Music by
Jörg Lemberg

Cinematography by
Yu Wang

Film Editing by
Xiaohong Che
Ye Lou

Production Design by
Weixin Liu

Art Direction by
James David Goldmark

Costume Design by
Weixin Liu

Production Management
Yongling Wu	....	production manager

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Bing Ren	....	assistant director
Lele Xu Le	....	second assistant director
Yanjia Zhang	....	assistant director

Sound Department
Jiajin Lu	....	sound

Other crew
Nairong Ge	....	action director
Shaoming Lu	....	action director
Min Zhou	....	action director

Production Companies

• Dream Factory
• Lou Yi Ltd.
• Shanghai Film Studios
• Shanghai SFS Digital Media Co.
• Wild Bunch

Distributors

• Palm Pictures (2004) (USA) (theatrical) (subtitled)
• Rosebud (2004) (Greece) (theatrical)
• Cinemax (2005) (Hungary) (TV)

Also Known As:

"Zi hudie" - China (original 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:

Could Not Get Your Love

War-time intrigue minus the intrigue.

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.