The Flowers of War

The Flowers of War places the struggle to survive the fall of Nanjing in December 1937 inside a Catholic church. Schoolgirls, women from the Qinhuai brothels and an American mortician who later impersonates a priest face the violence of the Japanese army. Zhang Yimou’s adaptation of Yan Geling’s fiction makes the movement from antagonism to protection between women its emotional centre. It also raises a question more difficult than whether its characters are courageous: can a story honour women’s bravery while using their sacrifice to preserve a hierarchy among women?

The discussion below includes major plot developments and the ending, and addresses wartime sexual violence.

Whose body becomes replaceable?

When Japanese officers demand that the schoolgirls perform at a victory celebration, the women led by Yu Mo decide to take their place. Responsibility must remain clear: the invading soldiers commit sexual violence; a woman’s occupation, clothing or sexual history does not cause it. Protecting children needs no argument that diminishes adult women. The danger arises when the recognition that children need protection becomes the suggestion that another group would suffer less from being assaulted. One recognises vulnerability; the other searches for a supposedly cheaper recipient of violence.

The antagonism between the two groups makes substitution more than an assignment of dangerous work. They enter the same refuge carrying different positions in a moral order of purity, respectability and shame. Katherina Li’s study of fragmented sisterhood examines chastity norms as instruments of oppression between women. This opens a productive question for the film: war need not dissolve everyday sexual hierarchies. It can intensify them into judgments about who should remain safe and who should leave.

To suggest that sexual experience makes further sexual violence less consequential erases consent. It treats a body as an object whose value declines through use. Sex workers retain the right to refuse, to survive and to escape other people’s violence. Recognising those rights does not deny the characters’ courage. It prevents courage from becoming a duty imposed on a whole category of women.

Sacrifice and agency can coexist

Reading the women only as passive offerings would also erase their judgment. They make the decision to substitute, and the emotional force comes from people previously despised protecting children. In an interview, Zhang describes their act as protecting the more vulnerable. Age matters here. A neat opposition between “good” and “bad” women should not swallow every difference in power or need.

Agency, however, does not make the conditions of a choice free. People under siege can make decisions of their own while a narrative repeatedly places a particular kind of woman where self-destruction is her only route to recognition. The character’s willingness and the filmmaker’s distribution of sacrifice are different questions. Keeping both in view allows acknowledgment of solidarity without making the arrangement beyond criticism.

Notice when respect becomes available. Does the audience recognise these women as people with lives and desires before their sacrifice, or must they relinquish survival to become worthy of esteem? If dignity has to be earned through death, the story may overturn contempt while retaining a deeper condition: marginalised women must become moral exemplars to receive equal sympathy. Their right to live should not depend on an exceptional act of goodness.

A woman’s viewpoint does not settle the ethics of looking

The dispute over the film’s beauty cannot be resolved by declaring beautiful images inappropriate. Beauty can preserve feelings and ordinary existence that violence seeks to destroy; dark or abrasive images have no automatic ethical superiority. The more useful issue is where a visual arrangement places its audience. Can a woman’s fear interrupt the pleasure of looking? Can she interpret her own situation rather than merely supply an image for someone else?

In his Directors Guild of America interview, Zhang links the girl’s viewpoint with fleeting poetry amid brutality. That intention deserves consideration. Yet a girl’s narrative perspective does not automatically prevent objectification: the character may be looking while the film invites the audience to look possessively in another way.

Follow what looking produces. Does it deepen an understanding of the women’s circumstances, or organise fear, desire and injured bodies into consumable emotion? Performance, sound, dialogue and closure all bear on the answer. Criticism itself must be careful here. Repeatedly detailing injuries to prove an ethical objection can turn victims’ bodies back into illustrative material, reproducing the exposure it claims to resist.

Who receives the rescuer’s development?

John Miller progresses from a drunken, money-minded outsider to a protector, receiving a legible story of moral growth. Roger Ebert questioned why this story needed a white male centre. The issue is not whether foreigners can help. It is how narrative opportunities are distributed: who can change, act and acquire a future, and whose disappearance enables someone else’s transformation?

Women’s decisions and male assistance can coexist. Miller’s involvement does not cancel Yu Mo’s actions; neither does her decision end the discussion of how stardom, viewpoint and closure redistribute attention. Calling the adaptation an attempt to please Western audiences would turn an inference into a proven motive. A firmer criticism identifies the actions and emotional rewards that the finished story gives each person.

Historical records can also interrupt the film’s rescue imaginary. Yale University Library’s Minnie Vautrin archive preserves her accounts of occupied Nanjing. Reading such records beside the film shifts attention towards the sustained work and risk involved in sheltering people. This is not a demand that a literary adaptation reproduce every historical figure. It is a reminder that one fictional rescuer cannot exhaust women’s work in the historical emergency.

What remains after being moved?

The strongest discussion need not choose between celebrating and condemning sacrifice. It can recognise mutual aid under extreme conditions while refusing to make self-sacrifice the highest proof of women’s value. That preserves both courage and an existing right to survive. Because the film does not follow the women taken away through their subsequent lives, its emotional closure also exceeds what it resolves about their fate.

Pair it with Angels Wear White to compare protection, sexual reputation and how images allow girls to remain subjects after violence. Chizuko Ueno’s Misogyny offers another route from judging individuals towards examining divisions among women and participation in maintaining them. The unsettling question is whether the solidarity we applaud leaves room for women who do not sacrifice themselves, embody purity or become heroes.