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Let me cut to the chase: Purple Butterfly is easily one of the most beautiful, suspenseful, and thrilling movies I have seen in quite some time. It is also the most frustrating one since 21 Grams. The latter, by the way, has absolutely nothing to do with Purple Butterfly, except for both directors share a penchant for posing puzzles to their audiences. At least Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the director of 21 Grams, decided halfway that enough is enough and went linear. Not so Lou Ye, the equally talented director of Purple Butterfly. Suffice it to say that even after reading the press kit, certain questions as to who exactly got killed by whom remained. And, judging by the director's statement, that's exactly how he meant it to be.
It is too early to say whether Mr. Ye has developed a style of his own. Of the Chinese masters we have been exposed to in the last ten years, Ye is perhaps the most European. The opening shots of Purple Butterfly—a hellhole of a factory and dour crowds of workers heading home after their shift—are reminiscent of Blind Shaft [review], an excellent Chinese film shown here last year. Later on, I realized that these images were completely unconnected to the rest of the film. Moreover, we don't even know what the hell the hero, a young Japanese man named Itami (Nakamura Tôru), was doing in the damn place. Then we get the first glance of Itami seeing Cynthia (beautiful Zhang Ziyi from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and coming soon House of Flying Daggers [NYFF review]): the two stand on opposing sides of a moving train and see each other through the gaps between the rushing cars—a striking image that I somehow expected to stand for "meeting cute" but one that becomes just as striking a metaphor for the impossibility of them being together. And so it goes: in scene after scene, Ye keeps pushing all the right buttons, fully engaging our senses—oh, but I do wish I knew what exactly what I was looking at!
Ye has certainly seen a lot of good films and has enough taste and imagination to put his erudition to good use. He knows how to do a heart-wrenching lyrical scene, and he knows how to do a breathless shoot-'em-up. But his insistence on keeping us in the dark gets in the way. For example, in a crucial episode, a young man named Szeto (Liu Ye) arrives in Shanghai by train and mistakenly dons a jacket that belongs to a hit man engaged by an underground group fighting Japanese occupation. Exiting the train, Szeto is handed a package with the gun and the info on the target. But the group was compromised: a shootout ensues, and Yiling (Li Bingbing), Szeto's fiancée who was meeting him, gets killed by a stray bullet in the mayhem.
It is probably unnecessary to replay the tape over and again: Ye's impressionistic style—and the way the scene is shot will keep you gasping—seems to suggest that it doesn't matter which side's bullet killed Yiling. But it does matter in trying to understand which way Szeto, now hopelessly stuck between the two sides, will turn. Lyrical uncertainty is fine and dandy for an alienation movie from the '60s; but Antonioni had the good sense to stay away from Le Carre-style plots, which is the kind that Ye does. Retelling this kind of plot is never easy, but it will perhaps be helpful. After a few years in Japan, Itami becomes hired by Japanese intelligence and returns to China to squash Purple Butterfly, a Chinese Resistance group operating in Shanghai. The latter get Cynthia (now under a different name) to re-kindle her romance with Itami, so that he will lead them to his boss Yamamoto—their ultimate target. Cynthia is understandably conflicted between The Cause and Itami (who invites her to come back to Tokyo with him). Into this intrigue steps Szeto, rendered numb by seeing his fiancée killed, being picked up by Purple Butterfly, and then interrogated—tortured, actually—by the Japanese. An amateur messing up professionals' well-laid plans is a cliché more commonly used in a comedy. But Purple Butterfly is anything but. It is as foggy a thriller as they come. Towards the end, Ye falls victim to his doubts regarding whether he has sufficiently characterized his heroine. So he sends the plot back in time (approximately the midpoint of the film's timeline), inserting a sex scene between Cynthia and her group leader—an addition of dubious value, both from logical and aesthetic viewpoints. Also, through the final shoot-'em-up, Ye's view remained strikingly free of politics. Both sides behaved like two rival gangs, without engaging in expected rhetoric about "Japanese aggressors" or "Chinese barbarians." So Ye, unsure whether he sent the right political message, follows the above sex scene with a "clarification": a couple of minutes of gruesome documentary footage of Japanese wartime abuses in China. My advice: leave the theater when you see Cynthia having sex with the leader. Or, if the sight of a beautiful woman in the throes of passion really turns you on, at least leave immediately thereafter. Trust me: you will have seen a better picture than I did.
Distributor Web site: Palm Pictures
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