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Rating: The Yawn of the Red Flowers.
I understand everything… I understand that we live in an ugly world and that we continuously feel the need for niceness and wanting to be all lovey-dovey, holding hands in liberating and therapeutic cries… I also understand playing on the spontaneity of children and the tenderness they elicit (it's well-known that a sad child with big eyes looking at you tearfully works great on any type of audience, and advertising has understood this for years!!).
In short, it's all well and good to tell stories with emotions, but mistaking this “The War of the Red Flowers” (2006) by Zhang Yuan for a genuine movie hit… that's too much for anyone!
A little film, let's say, very delicate (it's like saying “delicate” as when you tell a girl she's very nice, to avoid saying she's ugly, right?!) and as light as a spring dandelion, but after an hour and a half of screening, you find yourself asking:”…so? Where's it headed? What's the point? Why waste an hour and a half of a life that's already arid and short for everyone?”.
Extremely sparse screenplay, not to say inconsistent, which tackles the story of a 5-year-old boy (Qiang) left in a sort of orphanage/nursery around 1945 concomitant with the Second World War. More than a nursery, let's say it's a kind of Early Childhood Lager where everything is organized under strict paramilitary rules and where rewards and praises turn into shabby paper-mache red flowers (used instead of medals!): every flower is a prize, every 5 prizes, if one deserves them for the whole week, then he becomes “class leader” (now that's luck, I add ? ).
Then they narrate the antics of this mischievous Qiang who simply doesn't want to follow the pack's rules and causes all sorts of trouble (he wets the bed, touches girls' bottoms, punches other kids, climbs on window panes, doesn't poop when the morning rule demands it) until he's excluded from community life and withdraws into himself.
A film with an interesting idea if it weren't for it lacking narrative bite and having nothing to really grip us: the story is weak, the protagonist, as talented and convincing as he may be, doesn’t quite win us over perhaps due to the hostile and irascible character he plays, the teachers are neither good nor bad, and the other child co-stars are nothing special neither as actors nor in the little they tell us.
What to save? Certainly the good intentions, the patience, and the director's difficulty in filming dozens of children of that age (between 4 and 8 years old) generally hard to manage and to whom it's also really impossible to demand faithfulness to a script. So, even supposing a 50% margin of improvisation, one still wonders: why make such a masochistic movie and not, at this point, create an actual docu-film? I remember indeed, in the same vein as this, the film “To Be and to Have” by the French Nicholas Philibert set in a classroom in Saint-Etienne sur Usson: a small village in the Auvergne region, located in central-southern France. A film also delicate and subtle but at least it had the intellectual honesty to present itself as a true documentary and one was already psychologically prepared for what they would see.
I repeat: this “War of the Red Flowers” starts off well but then the story falters, unravels, and of the War promised in the title (meaning tension or conflict) not a trace! Everything flows flatly, everything happens in a far too natural manner in any given week of an ordinary pre-conflict Chinese nursery school. But it’s known, an excess of normality has never done cinema any good and stories where, in fact, nothing interesting or exciting happens generally end up in oblivion without anything to be remembered by.
Here, only just the spontaneity of the small actions of these children/inmates survived, trying to make do the best way possible in a situation that’s not exactly idyllic. Nice and even cute if you like, but TOO LITTLE to build a movie around.
Apart from this… everything else is boredom, I didn't say joy, but boredom boredom boredooom.. as our Califfo would say; the classic movie neither meat nor fish that will be forgotten within a couple of days.
Actually.
What movie were we talking about?
P.S. If your masochism level hasn't had enough, check out the trailer here, but be careful not to be charmed by the protagonist's wide-open eyes, these marketing guys are so cunning in striking right at the heart, huh?! ?
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