Purple Butterfly (2003)

Powerful

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The movie is set in 1930s China where the Japanese occupied China. It is a complex love story disguised as a spy thriller. I suspect the whole staging of the era and its circumstances is simply to illustrate an idea. "The idea that a new lover demands one to "kill" her old lover."What more convenient way to illustrate this than actually killing someone. But the act is merely symbolic. If the movie was set in modern times without the apparatus of physical murder, then it would take a long long time to illustrate the killing/erasing of an old love. In the movie, the main character played by Zhang Ziyi, realizes only after she has killed her old lover, she had made a grave mistake and she regrets. Only then, she realizes she loves him the most.Another interesting idea it illustrated is that -the mind and body does mysterious things. The main character betrays her true love by a cause she does not really believe. She follows the orders of a man who she doesn't really love. Strangers we are even to ourselves.

Following the well trodden path of the traditional spy romance, Purple Butterfly is shot in a languid melancholic mood and hue that is characteristic of director Lou Ye, but without the enigmatic air of Suzhou River.The plot is quite simple, but with a good deal of attention paid to details, and some normal use of flashbacks. The pace is slow, a refreshing change from the formulaic Hollywood slam-bang storytelling that has managed to kill the taste buds of a vast portion of moviegoers for finer things in movie-making. Zhang Ziyi, who has been such a disappointment looking like a wooden puppet in House of Flying Dagger in the hands of degenerated Zhang Yimou, looks much better here under the direction of Lau Ye. This all goes to show what a huge difference it can make to an actor between having a good director and a bad director. Set against the backdrop of the prelude to the Japanese invasion, in Manchuria in 1929, Zhang plays a girl Cynthia that falls in love with a Japanese classmate Itami who has to return home. A few years later in Shanghai, Cynthia has become a member of an underground organization, in a collision course with Itami who is coming back to China in the opposite camp. This familiar dramatic situation, plus Cynthia's affair with the organization's leader, provides Zhang with ample opportunities for acting a range of varied emotions, which she handles quite well.Situ (Liu Ye) and Tang Yiling (Li Bingbing) are innocent sweethearts drawn into this deadly game through a case of mistaken identity, ending in Tang getting killed in a shootout at the train station where she is going to meet Situ. Liu, one of the finest actors today in China (Mountain Postman, Lan Yu, Little Chinese Seamstress, Floating Landscape), handles this role of a totally devastated lover with ease, but also depth. Li Bingbing, seen most recently in A World Without Thieves, manages to leave a most lovely impression with her barely fifteen minutes' appearance in the movie. Toru Nakamura playing Itami, cool and confident, is perfect for the role.The movie is thoroughly enjoyable in its entirety of a little over two hours. The ending is particularly clever, a somewhat abrupt but very effective flashback which dilutes the impact of the emotional "real" ending and, by one simple image of Tang on the streetcar to the train station, identifies the exact time frame as well as brings the whole thing full circle to the start of the series of events that lead to the ultimate tragedy. The scene that I remember most, however, is not with the principal actors, but with the pair of innocent young lovers, before their short parting. Not a single word is exchanges. Tang puts a record of a period song in the archaic gramophone (the kind that needs winding up) and the two start dancing, not cheek-to-cheek, but sort of a slow, teasing rock. A little bitter-sweet, unabashedly romantic, this is the best scene in the movie.Those who complain in their comments that this movie is difficult to follow or understand will do well to try to read a couple of Dr. Seuss books in stead of going to a movie. I am talking from personal experience here as both my sons, before they entered grade school, derived a great deal of pleasure from, and fully understood, The Cat in the Hat. Surely, these individuals I referred to should not encounter significant difficulties in similar pursuits.

I am a huge Ziyi Zhang fan and will go to any film to see her which is what took me to Purple Butterfly. As much as I wanted to like this movie, I have to agree with many others who have commented on it. It is very confusing and also extremely slow. Because all of the film appears to have been shot with a hand held camera, significant portions of it are out of focus. The film has very little dialog and what there is doesn't tell you much. There are endless scenes of people just standing around smoking cigarettes or sitting in a room staring at each other with no conversation. The way the film time shifts is also very confusing and hard to follow. Even having read a number of reviews beforehand and having a general idea what the film was about, I still had a difficult time understanding what was going on. I knew beforehand that the movie was not remotely similar to previous Ziyi Zhang starring films but was looking forward to seeing her in something different but unfortunately I was ultimately disappointed. She never smiles in this film although admittedly most of the time she doesn't have anything to smile about. I could have done without the sex scenes as they were about as sexless and without any obvious feeling between the participants as you could hope to find.

Purple Butterfly has a chaotic editing style and claustrophobic cinematography. The story line cuts back in forth from the past to the present and is hard to follow. The scenes are rainy and blurred and the cinematographer's choice of lens made some of the action blurred. This all makes Purple Butterfly seem like a bad movie, but it is suitable to the mood and story being told. Purple Butterfly is dramatic and experimental in its ways and was one of the best films at Cannes Film Festival.