Purple Butterfly Review

Lou Ye’s Purple Butterfly drew instant comparisons to the work of Wong Kar Wai when it began touring the festival circuit in 2003, and for good reason. Though the film never reaches the same heights as WKW’s better work it shares quite a lot in common beyond the international star power of Zhang Ziyi.

The film opens in 1928 Shanghai. There is a strong Japanese presence in China but, despite and undercurrent of racial tension, open hostility between the two nations has yet to break out. The film opens on Itami, a young Japanese man, making his way from his factory job to meet Cynthia, his Chinese girlfriend played by Zhang Ziyi, to spend a final evening together before he must return to Japan for his mandatory military service. Cynthia, unable to handle the emotion of seeing Itami off in person, stands crying at a station window as his train pulls away the following morning and returns home to witness her brother, an anti-Japan activist, slain in the street by a militant Japanese extremist. We jump three years, to 1931. Japan has declared war on China and occupied Shanghai. Cynthia, hardened and embittered by her brother’s killing, has become a member of the Purple Butterfly, a violent underground resistance movement.

Enter Szeto and Yiling, a young Chinese couple separated when Szeto is drafted into the war. Szeto is shipped back home and, in his rush to meet his waiting lover on the train platform, mistakenly takes the wrong suit jacket as he leaves the train. The new jacket prominently displays a lapel pin in the shape of a butterfly, a signal for Cynthia and her waiting militant cell that its bearer is an awaited hitman sent to execute the local head of the Japanese secret police. Japanese forces have gotten word of the hitman’s arrival and are lying in wait for the Purple Butterfly members, leading to a violent firefight on the crowded train platform and in the confusion Szeto is taken away by the members of Purple Butterfly and can do nothing but watch in horror as Yiling is gunned down in the crossfire. When the Purple Butterfly realize their error Szeto becomes expendable and is abandoned only to then be picked up and brutalized by Japanese forces who hope to use him for their own gain. Complicating things further the local Japanese secret police have undergone a change in leadership with the new leader being, you guessed it, Cynthia’s returned lover Itami. This is the launching point for an extended cat and mouse game: which side can get to the other first? And just how deeply have all of these people been changed by the war experience?

So what does the film do well? The strong aspects are the ones which draw all of the WKW comparisons. Production design is simply fantastic with flawless attention to period detail. The cinematography is gorgeous, characters and situations are given ample room to breathe, and the performances – particularly those of Szeto and Itami – are very strong. This is a complex, turbulent period of history that we are largely ignorant of here in the west and Lou Ye does an admirable job of bringing it to the screen. From the mass street protests and simmering racial resentment to the authentic Chinese vocal jazz music he hits all the right notes to bring this world to life. On a purely technical level the film is a huge success. But it does stumble on a couple of other counts.

Purple Butterfly is a film that underwent a seemingly endless editing process with different versions of the film turning up at different festivals as Ye continued to try to find the right rhythm – another way in which he merits comparison to WKW – but he never quite nailed it. Though the film never outright falls, it does stumble from time to time. I put this down to it being too ambitious. Ye simply wants to do too much here, with too many details, too many characters and too many sub plots and, as a result, there are some moments that he is not able to spend enough time on to fully flesh out, most significantly the relationship between Itami and Cynthia.

Now, this is a film built entirely around Zhang Ziyi’s character and the ability of the audience to identify with her is a make or break issue. Underneath all of the political intrigue this should be a film about the love affair between Cynthia and Itami – how did these lovers end up on opposite sides of the fence and how will they resolve the inner conflict this creates? The problem is that Ye never once shows us the two of them actually happy to be together. We enter the relationship when Cynthia is dealing with the impending loss of her lover rather than seeing them prior to this, when they were purely and simply in love, and as a result we never really have a sense of her loss or the depth of her inner conflict. Contrast this with Szeto’s relationship with Yiling, which we DO see in full flower, and how deeply we feel Szeto’s pain as a result. I found myself wishing more than once that Ye had opted to put Szeto at the center of his story simply because I could identify with this simple man trying to deal with his grief as he is caught between these two hugely impersonal and deeply violent forces far more than I could with Cynthia as she was presented. Does this do irreparable damage to the film? I’m on the fence on that one … it still has an awful lot going for it but I can’t shake the feeling that it could have been a masterpiece if this one central problem had been corrected.

Though light on extras – all there is here is a trailer reel and a written introduction for the director – Palm has given us a typically strong DVD release. The transfer is very good, presented in anamorphic 16:9 with excellent English subtitles and 5.1 surround.