Devils on the Doorstep [鬼子来了] (2000)

Devils on the Doorstep, rather unusually for a Chinese film, opens with a stirring rendition of a Japanese military song. The film is set in 1945 in a small village in north China (Hebei) during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. The occupying Japanese troops go out on regular patrols (with their marching band) but otherwise seem to have little contact with the locals. (Because the troops are naval reservists, the song is the Japanese Navy song which some may recognise from Ozu films).

One night Ma Dasan [Jiang Wen who also directed] is in bed with his girlfriend, widow Yu’er [Jiang Hongbo]. An armed bandit breaks in and leaves two large bags on the floor. He says he will return to collect them by New Years Day (5 days away). When Dasan opens the bags he discovers two terrified Japanese soldiers.

The village elders interrogate the two, from behind a screen, and discover that one is Hanaya Kosaburo [Kagawa Teruyuki], a fanatical Japanese; while the other is Dong Hanchen [Yuan Ding] a Chinese translator. Hanaya does not speak Chinese and, of course, the locals know no Japanese. Much of the early comedy comes from Dong’s deliberately inaccurate translation between the two. So when Hanaya curses the Chinese and pleads with them to shoot him, Dong translates this as a plea for his life.

But when the mysterious bandit does not return as promised, the villagers are left with a dilemma. As Dasan is unable to bring himself to kill the men with his own hands, they search for alternative options. Although the tone becomes more serious, the films is still quite comic at this stage.

But it takes a much darker turn when the villagers, as the suggestion of Hanaya, decide to hand the men back to the Japanese army in the hopes of a reward. Predictably this does not go well but few may anticipate the full extent of the disaster.

Then the Nationalist Army arrives to liberate the area (with US support). The KMT troops are portrayed in an almost buffoonish light with more concern for the Japanese PoWs than the local Chinese. But Dasan’s desire for vengeance leads to further bloodshed.

I have never seen another Chinese war film like (or even remotely like) this. The opening half surges along with pace and wit. But there is an unevenness of tone and a lack of a sense of direction which weaken the overall impact. The film is perhaps best seen as a somewhat surreal anti-war film in the vein of Fire on the Plains (1959). But Jiang Wen seems to lose control of the film’s direction in the second half.

The version originally shown in Cannes apparently ran to a extra 20 minutes though Derek Elley’s review of the longer version suggests that nothing was lost in the cutting.

Shot in black and white, the acting by all concerned is excellent, especially in the more grounded first half.

It’s an unheroic take on the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. Being China, this ran into serious problems with the censor. But it gets an incredibly high 9.3 on Douban.