Eventually, it seems, every senseless waste of life gets its own gauzy tear-jerker. That’s about the only way to justify “The Flowers of War,” in which the veteran Chinese director
Zhang Yimou revisits the Nanjing massacre of 1937 by making something resembling a backstage musical, with breaks for the occasional ghastly murder or rape.
这电影被张艺谋拍的像个偶尔穿插着惊悚的谋杀和强奸的后台音乐剧。
There’s nothing that says the atrocity blockbuster has to be a disaster in its own right; films like
“Gone With the Wind” and “Gallipoli” have their good points. But long before its two and a half hours are up, “The Flowers of War” is sunk by the disproportion between the events being portrayed and Mr. Zhang’s distanced, strangely frivolous treatment of them — in essence, his refusal to take a point of view on one of the most gruesome chapters in Chinese history.
《金陵十三钗》的沦陷本质上是因为张艺谋不愿对这段黑暗的中国历史明确自己的观点。
“Flowers” has received bountiful publicity for being expensive, state-approved and Oscar-submitted,
buzz that got louder last week when the film’s British star,
Christian Bale, was forcibly prevented from visiting a Chinese activist lawyer being held under house arrest.
电影宣传造势很大。。。
但是担心张艺谋会采用单纯的爱国方式对待日本侵略和南京陷落（影片虽有体现）是不必要啦。其他近期的电影对情感化的国家主义、沙文主义和对日本军队的妖魔化表现强烈的多。
His real approach to the events of 1937 is to use them as a backdrop for the kind of deluxe, Hollywood-inspired melodrama that has made him an art-house favorite. In the process he fails to deliver on most of the elements — grandeur, historical sweep, genuine pathos — that would have made the film worthwhile.
张艺谋描述1937南京大屠杀的真正方式是把南京大屠杀作为一种华丽的，好莱坞闹剧式的背景。这个过程中，张艺谋没有传达出宏大、历史的扫描、真实的悲伤这些使得电影值得一看的元素。
Given the right story, as in
“Raise the Red Lantern” or “House of the Flying Daggers,” Mr. Zhang’s almost clinical attention to pretty surfaces and soap-opera mechanics can have entertaining results. In “Flowers,” though, you can feel him at war with his material, never settling on a tone or a compelling or even coherent narrative. (The screenplay is by Liu Heng and Geling Yan, based on a novel by Ms. Yan.)
如果有合适的故事，比如在《大红灯笼高高挂》或者《十面埋伏》中，张艺谋的几乎病态的追究漂亮画面和肥皂剧技巧可以取得娱乐的效果。然而在《金陵十三钗》中，你可以感觉到张艺谋本身和他的素材在打仗，从未定下基调或者一个吸引人甚至连贯的叙述。
Mr. Zhang’s distance from the larger story of the massacre is embodied in his decision to set most of the film within the compound of a fictional European church. The result is an artificial, back-lot atmosphere; the opening scenes, set in the streets, take place in an actual fog of war, with smoke (and at one point the dust from a large mound of flour) isolating the characters from the real world of Nanjing.
张艺谋和南京大屠杀这个大故事的距离具体体现在他决定把大部分的电影拍摄在一个虚构的欧洲教堂。结果产生了很虚假的背景；开场设在战烟弥漫的街道，这些烟雾把这些人物角色和真正的南京隔离了。
Mr. Bale plays John Miller, a disreputable American vagabond who happens to be a mortician; as the film begins he is making his way through the fighting toward the church, where he is to be paid to conduct a burial. Also on the move are two groups of a dozen or so young women, the flowers of the title. They are, as a matter of production design if not credible history, visually coded: convent students in severe blue jackets and prostitutes in seductive, rainbow-hued silken dresses.
贝勒扮演的约翰是个美国流浪汉兼入殓师，影片开始时他正在战火下去教堂埋人的路上。同时在路上的两组年轻女人：影片标题中的十三钗。她们，作为电影设计若不是真实的历史，被视觉化了：穿蓝布衫的修道院学生和穿妖媚的五颜六色丝质旗袍的妓女。
All of these parties take refuge in the church, with Miller, who dons the robes of a dead priest, bridging the Manichaean divide between the suspicious students upstairs and the contemptuous, defensive prostitutes hiding in the basement. (They quickly transform their cellar into a seraglio; you can practically smell the perfume.) It’s a contrived, hothouse state of affairs, summed up in a scene Mr. Zhang likes so much that he repeats it: the laughing prostitutes sashaying across the churchyard in slow motion, oblivious to the impending tragedy.
这些人都在教堂避难。贝勒穿了已死的牧师的袍子，充当了楼上满腹怀疑的学生和地下室里充满蔑视和戒备的妓女之间的桥梁。这种做作集中体现在一个张艺谋爱得以至于一再重复使用的场景里：妓女笑着慢慢穿过教堂院子，无视即将发生的悲剧。
There will be tragedy, of course, though when it comes it takes a weirdly oblique form. One group eventually performs what appears to be an ultimate sacrifice, full of sexual and social overtones, but this happens off-camera, if it happens at all. The coyness can be explained, perhaps, in terms of the film’s structure — the story is narrated by one of the students, and what we see may correspond to her selective, romanticized memories — but it cannot really be excused.
当然是有悲剧的，但是悲剧来的时候用了一种奇怪间接的方式。妓女最终做出了看起来是终极牺牲，充满性和社会暗示，但这些没有演出来，如果它实际发生了的话。这种含蓄或许是因为影片的故事是一个学生的描述，我们看到的和她选择性的浪漫化的回忆相呼应，但这真的不能做为理由。
On-screen, meanwhile, the camera ventures into the outside world in occasional scenes that seem timed to goose the action and remind us that we’re watching a war movie. In one of Mr. Zhang’s few outright concessions to the notion of Chinese supremacism, a lone officer (Tong Dawai) draws a contingent of Japanese soldiers away from the church in an act of hyperbolic heroism. Later, in a surrender to gross sentimentality, two prostitutes leave the church on the sort of insane mercy mission that happens only in movies, with particularly disturbing consequences. Aside from that sequence Mr. Zhang is restrained in his depictions of Japanese brutality, which mostly take the form of threats and intimidation.
同时荧幕上，偶尔会有外面的场景，看起来是推进情节并提醒我们：我们在看的是一场战争电影。在张艺谋少数妥协了而正面表达中国至上主义的场景中，佟大为扮演的军官用一种夸张的英雄主义行为引开了教堂附近的日军。之后张艺谋干脆投降到一场过度情绪化的情节，两个妓女离开教堂去干只有在电影中才会发生的类似疯子式的同情心行为，并带来了令人很反感恐慌的结局。除去上面的情节，张艺谋把自己对日本人残酷性的描述基本限制为威胁和恐吓。
Mr. Bale, turning in a respectable if oddly chipper performance under the circumstances, has the unfortunate task of playing a character who doesn’t really add up. Miller’s conversion from opportunist to savior may be another stock element of this sort of movie, but the scene meant to showcase his transformation is rushed and ineffective. Having made an American the central figure in his film, Mr. Zhang reduces him to wrangling flocks of nubile women, like Cary Grant in a much more violent “Father Goose.”
贝勒不幸饰演这样一个无法自圆其说的角色。。。贝勒从投机主义到救世主的转变可能是这类电影另一个赚取票房的元素，但是表现他转变的场景很急促而无效。通过让一个美国人作为他电影的主要人物，张艺谋把自己降低到了一群扯皮性感的女人中。
与其它一些更好但并不如此铺张的描述南京大屠杀的电影，如陆川的《南京！南京》，以及纪录片《南京》一对比，《金陵十三钗》败的更惨。这些电影都展现了导演自己对此事件的观点，而张艺谋却退回到陈旧电影的迷雾中，谢绝表明立场。
