Art house: Japanese wartime occupation in Devils on the Doorstep
Paul Fonoroff
High-profile censure at home and prestigious festival awards abroad are sure ways for films to attain critical cachet. But they are little guarantee of cinematic worth. Both “honours” were bestowed upon Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorstep, but this 2000 film has little need of notoriety or statuettes to attest to its lofty status in the pantheon of second world war classics.
The production is quite unlike anything previously attempted on mainland celluloid, where the “War of Resistance against Japan” has been a major genre for decades – and one that invariably hews strictly to the Communist Party line.
A top director, producer, screenwriter, and star with surprisingly little concern for the box office when it comes to pursuing his artistic vision, Jiang takes a much more nuanced view in his dramatisation of one village’s fate during the war’s waning months in 1945. The results are hilarious and horrifying, providing an unconventionally entertaining look at the conflict and the moral dilemmas faced by the victims. Events largely play out in a hamlet near the Great Wall which has been occupied by Japanese forces since 1937.
Ma, his pregnant lady friend (Jiang Hongbo) and his fellow villagers are stuck between a rock and a hard place, facing certain death if their “guests” are discovered by the Japanese “devils”, and doomed to a similar fate if they fail the patriots.
The central mystery of precisely who delivered the package quickly becomes secondary to the peasants’ efforts to ensure their own and their prisoners’ survival. The script is full of black humour, although the mood changes in the second half, when matters escalate out of control just as “peace” is declared.
So why was such a credit to China’s motion picture industry banned in its homeland?