War-torn 'Purple Butterfly' is lush but confusing

Friday, January 7, 2005

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Ye Lou's romantic thriller, set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the early 1930s, plays like an Eastern art-house take on the World War II occupation drama by way of Wong Kar-Wai.

MOVIE REVIEW

PURPLE BUTTERFLY

DIRECTOR: Ye Lou

CAST: Zhang Ziyi, Toru Nakamura, Yuanzheng Feng

RUNNING TIME: 127 minutes

LANGUAGE: Mandarin, Japanese and Vietnamese, with English subtitles

RATING: R for strong violence and a scene of sexuality

WHERE: Grand Illusion

GRADE: C+

Zhang Ziyi (of "House of Flying Daggers" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" fame) stars as Cynthia, a working-class woman in industrial Manchuria in 1928. She bids her Japanese lover Itami (Toru Nakamura) farewell amid the workaday bustle. Platoons of troops on the move only add to the congestion and hint at the tension poised to explode.

Cut to 1931, Shanghai. Manchuria is occupied by Japan. Cynthia has transformed into the mysterious Ding Hui, an agent in the resistance movement (the Purple Butterfly of the title) and Itami returns to China to take charge of Japan's secret service, working directly under the man targeted by the Chinese resistance.

What follows is an intriguing but unnec- essarily confusing puzzle of an espionage thriller, involving mistaken identities, double agents, romantic complications, jealousy and revenge.

Directed at a languid pace and shot with a hand-held camera that seems to drift above the often obscure narrative, it's as visually sumptuous and luxuriously atmospheric as it is complex and confusing. Amid the dense crosscutting, the enigmatic flashbacks only add to the muddiness of the story.

Zhang is incandescent as the innocent turned revolutionary and shows the toll of her ordeal -- the lies, the sacrifices, the casualties caught in the crossfire -- in her haunted eyes and empty face. The rest of the cast members, however, are impassive. The civilians and spies alike mask their emotions with hard, impenetrable faces.

"Purple Butterfly" is rich with emotional turmoil and searing beauty, but it could have used a little more time in the editing room to make sense of it all.

Sean Axmaker is a movie reviewer and freelance film writer based in Seattle. He can be reached via e-mail at seanax@hotmail.com.