During
WWII, strong ties were forged between America and the Chinese people, thanks to
the Flying Tigers, the Yankee volunteer pilots serving with the Chinese Air Force.
Jack Turner is not one of them, but he is still pretty close. The Army Air
pilot will complete a spectacular bombing run over Tokyo, but he crashes over
Zhejiang shortly thereafter. Fortunately, a beautiful war widow and her little
daughter will provide Turner shelter at great risk to themselves in Bille
August’s Chinese co-production, In Harm’s
Way (a.k.a. The Chinese Widow, a.k.a.
The Hidden Soldier, trailer here), which opens
today in Los Angeles.
Life
is a struggle for Ying, but she still dutifully supports her in-laws with the
proceeds of her traditional silk-making. Unfortunately, her daughter Nunu still
allows grief and anger to distract her from her school work. One day while collecting
silk worms, they chance across the badly injured Turner. With the encouragement
of the village headman, her husband’s boyhood friend Kai, Ying hides the pilot
in her secret cellar. Not long after, the sadist Captain Shimamoto kills Kai to
teach the village a lesson. It certainly clarifies the stakes for Ying—and even
more so for the pouty Nunu.
Despite
the language barrier, Ying and Turner quickly fall in love. He also starts to
win over Nunu, which is no small feat. Fortunately, their rapport is fast and
furious, because nasty old Shimamoto senses something suspicious about Ying.
August
and screenwriter Greg Latter checked all the requisite boxes of a Chinese WWII
movie. The Nationalists are cowardly bumblers, the Communist guerillas are the
real patriots, and the Japanese are monsters from Hell. Granted, the sympathetic
American is a bit of a new wrinkle, but he is really just a vehicle to
establish Ying’s self-sacrificing heroism. Still, as Ying and Turner, Crystal
Liu Yifei and Emile Hirsch have much stronger chemistry than the uniformly poor
notices have indicated. However, the best thing going for the film is young Li
Fangcong’s remarkable performance as Nunu.
The
cast is not the problem here. It is Latter’s utterly predictable script, which follows
a straight, orderly line, with absolutely no deviations, detours, reversals of
fortune, or anything else that might build suspense. Frankly, August does next
to nothing to wring tension out of Turner’s potential discovery. Even the
climatic action sequence looks problematically small in scale.
Arguably,
In Harm’s Way would be a pretty good
TV movie, but it just doesn’t have theatrical chops. There are definitely
propaganda elements, but some critics have been especially hard on it, ever
since it awkwardly replaced Ann Hui’s universally hailed Our Time Will Come as the opening film of the Shanghai
International Film Festival—a move widely considered to have been orchestrated by
Beijing to favor August’s Party-line-towing film over Hui’s morally complex
tale of intrigue involving the Hong Kong resistance.
