In 1937 the Japanese invaded China and began to systematically exterminate the people they found as they moved across the country from Shanghai to Wuhan. They hadn’t actually declared war on China, claiming they were helping the country, which gave them more freedom to play outside the rules for things like the treatment of POWs and the admittance of the press.
This is the setting for Children of the Silk Road, a film centring around the true story of one journalist’s experience of the eastern beginning of World War II.
Desperate to get into the city of Nanjing, Japan’s latest conquest, and report on what’s really happening, George Hogg poses as a Red Cross delivery driver and makes it into Japanese controlled territory.
What follows is not what he expected, but that’s what happens when life takes you in hand and points you in a different direction.
Children of the Silk Road was clearly made by people who revered Hogg, and this is not a weakness of the movie at all. It is a brutal piece of work, as full of violent and disturbing images and ideas, as any truthful story of any war must be.
The children of the title are war orphans, irreparably damaged boys from toddlers to teenagers. On the whole, the young actors portraying them hit an authentic note of scary blankness that shields savage fear and anger.
Playing Oxford man Hogg, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers puts in a decidedly average performance with moments of unforgivable woodenness. The only times he shines is in moments of pure visceral fear, pain or shock.
His co-stars, Radha Mitchell (Finding Neverland), Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) and Chow Yun Fat (Anna and the King, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) have a handful of wooden moments as well, but theirs are mostly due to having to say some truly appalling lines. And some of these are really terribly dodgy.
It’s a trap of retellings of factual events: the urge to make sure the audience has all the information and doing it by giving the characters all sorts of unnatural exposition dialogue. Thankfully, Silk Road’s historical factoid chats are mostly limited to the first act.
Zhao Xiaoding’s cinematography is one of the film’s best features. It brings out the harsh majesty of the mountainous regions of China and the Silk Road itself to the edge of the Gobi Desert in the country’s east.
The story is a catalogue of the cruelty human beings constantly inflect on each other, offset by the noble heights the same species can reach to help others in need.
It is the heights reached by one man who stepped up (after some prodding by a pretty girl and an enigmatic freedom fighter) that the film focuses on. It is a starkly individual story in a great big global context.
The idea of war as a human activity is an even larger context that could have been explored more, and with great resonance for those of us who are citizens of countries recently and currently engaged in activities that have killed half a million civilians of the country we’re trying to help.
It’s also quite interesting that this film, portraying the Chinese as a people threatened and abused by outside forces is released in the year of the Beijing Olympics. It’s a fairly safe bet that films based on the more recent tribulations of the Chinese people at the hands of internal forces will not be appearing anytime soon.
That aside, Silk Road is neither particularly anti-Japanese nor pro-Chinese. It is pro-pacifism, but active pacifism; constructive resistance rather than conscientious objection. Blowing up records rather than people. Teaching children to grow vegetables rather than fire a gun. Leading them out of conscription’s and bombs’ way rather than cowering in a bunker.
For all its flaws, it is watch-worthy if only to be reminded of the extents of depravity we as a race can sink to and the heights of honourableness to which we can rise. And the scenery is well worth seeing on the big screen.
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Children of the Silk Road opened yesterday.
Starring:
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Radha Mitchell
Michelle Yeoh
Chow Yun Fat
Writer: James MacManus, Jane Hawksley
Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Executive Producer: Lillian Birnbaum
Producers: Arthur Cohn, Wieland Schulz-Keil, Martin Hagemann, Jonathan Shteinman, Peter Loehr
Line Producer: Eryong Wang Zhang
Composer: David Hirschfelder
Cinematographer: Zhao Xiaoding
Production Designer: Steven Jones-Evans
Editor: Geoff Lamb
Art Director: Xinming Huang
Costume Designers: Gao Wenyan, Kym Barrett
