Jiang Wen, one of China's foremost male actors, stars in and directs Devils at the Doorstep, a movie adapted from the book of the same name. It is a black and white film about a family in a village in northern China during WWII where the Japanese have taken over. The film is a parable about the how average people carry the brunt of the excesses and absurdities of wars that are waged by distant and inscrutable leaders for no particular reason.

The hero of the movie is Ma Dasan (Jiang Wen), a local farmer in a tightly-knit village who one night is suddenly given custody of two prisoners of war by a strange soldier. The soldier, arriving at his door and referring to himself as "Me", is a Nationalist resistance fighter who tells Dasan at gunpoint to keep the prisoners until he returns to retrieve them in eight days. His identity is unknown and his face is unseen. He disappears and his never seen again, leaving Dasan and his family with the responsibility of taking care of two live prisoners, a Chinese spy and a Japanese soldier named Hayana (Teruyuki Kagawa). Dasan is not a soldier or a spy. His house was randomly picked by the resistance fighters because his lights were on. Dasan has nothing to do at all with the military activity that has gone on around him and lacks the education to fully understand the reasons for it. He is essentially a good man with a kind heart who wants to stay out of trouble.

But this is difficult now that he has to enemy soldiers in his basement while Japanese squadrons continually patrol outside. The Japanese soldier is rabid and violent, spouting insults and hateful jingo in his own language, and if not bound with rope, would probably kill all the Chinese in the village as he has been programmed by his military training. His emotional range leaps from fury to terror
and back again, as if these were the only two things he understands in life. He does not understand the timid benevolence of the Chinese family charged with his custody, especially when the Chinese spy deliberately misinterprets all conversation that happens between them in order to save their lives. When the Chinese family curiously questions Hayana through the spy, the spy tells Hayana that the family wants to torture and kill him. When Hayana howls in terror, the spy tells the family that he's just hungry.

This is the premise of the beginning of the movie. If it sounds like a paranoid, screwball comedy, then indeed, that's the form it takes, at least in the beginning. But in the last third of the movie, the movie changes into a Kafkaesque tragedy. The intensity of the paranoia and moral struggle grows the entire length of the movie and culminates in an excruciating climax. The real meat of the story occurs among the Chinese family as they argue what to do with the two uncontrollable prisoners, especially when it is shown they will try to escape. Some family members think they'd be better off killing the prisoners and burying the evidence. Dasan's girlfriend is sickened by the thought of killing the men and thinks they should just return them to the Japanese, risking their own lives. The fact is that none of them wants to die, and no one wants the responsibility of having to kill, yet they are placed in a dilemma where at least one option must be chosen. Lacking resolve, they try one option twice and give up, then go for the other choice, which at first seems like a grand success. But after a series of bizarre (and perhaps improbable) coincidences, they discover they have made a huge mistake. The mistake makes itself known through ironies of almost mathematical precision all the way to the end of the movie.

I have to say that I was a bit overwhelmed by this movie. This was most probably because I saw the movie subtitled in French and sometimes did not know what was being said. Aside from that, there is the overall emotional intensity of the film; it's really heavy. It is filmed in high-contrast black and white with lighting effects designed to make best use of that medium, which you don't see done very often nowadays. The acting is done with exhausting energy.

The thing I like most about this film is its uncompromising candidness. It does not seem affected by much political propaganda. And if it is, I am at least left with more of an interest of what actually went on between China and Japan during WWII. I read in an interview that when doing research for this movie, Jiang Wen interviewed actual veterans of the Sino-Japanese war from both China and Japan and collected stories of a candid and intense nature. Indeed, it seems Jiang Wen has tried to infuse the movie with the same candidness and intensity. The film misses no targets in its honest criticism of all those who participated in World War Two in China. It condemns the Japanese Army for their ridiculous pride and their monstrous brutality toward Chinese civilians. Yet it is unafraid to show them as real human beings with emotions, intelligence, reason, honor and the capacity for benevolence. These are possibly the reasons the movie is banned in China. Beijing is afraid the factual depiction of Japanese as murderers will hurt Sino-Japanese relations and thus hurt Japanese economic investment in China. Beijing is also uncomfortable with the depiction of Japanese soldiers as human beings with feelings. It's as if Beijing wants China to continue to make war films like Hollywood does, with the Japanese soldiers depicted as faceless, gibbering automatons, programmed to kill yet not personally responsible for what they do.

As if that were not enough, the film also curses the Chinese themselves, particularly the Nationalists, for being weak, compromising, ignorant and politically fractured. It criticizes the Americans for having no interest in China except where they can establish their own economic and political agenda, as they condemn the Communists for their perceived crimes while ignoring injustices committed by Nationalists and postwar Japanese. In a way the movie calls in to question the ways in which people are victimized. Is victimhood forced upon people, or is there always an extent to which people bring it upon themselves through their own actions?

I have never seen a movie that explores emotions so thoroughly and accurately that I don't know whether to call it a surrealist, absurdist comedy
or an accurate historical drama, but this is it. There are moments of true originality in this picture. A man nurses two bound men in white burlap sacks with water poured through holes cut for their mouths, like large infant sausages drinking milk. An executioner, before decapitating a man, finds the need to nervously flick an ant off of the man's neck before he can cut. Where else can we see this? How can a movie like this remain unseen while millions throng to see See Spot Run where a man rolls around in dog feces for laughs? Devils at the Doorstep is classic material. It is a full, complete story with an energy and an intelligence that are carried through to the very end. Moreover, the movie makes sense when it gets there. Somehow I know it will never be shown in the United States for the very same reason it is not shown in China; it's too honest and too good a movie.