Not skin deep

Red Cherry plumbs the horrors of war

by Peter Keough

*** RED CHERRY Directed by Ye Ying. Written by Jiang Qitao. With Guo Ke-Yu, Xu Xiaoli, and Vladimir Nizmiroff. A Moonstone International release. At Maynard Fine Arts.

Like its deceptively sweet title, director Ye Ying's Red Cherry briefly conceals its rapturous horrors behind a surface of innocence. Chuchu (the astonishing 17-year-old first-time actress Guo Ke-Yu) is one of two apple-cheeked orphans who have fled the bloodshed of the Chinese revolution for the seeming refuge of an international school in the Soviet Union. Coached by her companion Luo Xiaoman (a coltish and moody Xu Xiaoli), the doll-like girl recites a rote and fictional life story to the assembled students and staffs. Urged to tell the truth, she reverts to her native Chinese, and her face turns nightmarish as she tells how her father was executed by being sliced in half by a hay cutter.

This devastating shift in tone is typical of the director's method, as the film evolves from bucolic lyric to ravaged epic, probing not just the viability of virtue but the validity of art in a world of unrestrained evil. At first daunting, the new school proves an almost too idealized community, with a wise, avuncular principal, sensitive teachers, and schoolmates who are merely fascinated by their new companions' differences. The two learn to become good socialists -- Ye's approach to good citizenship is more humanistic than ideological. When the students' adolescent spirits occasionally erupt -- a boy/girl rumpus leading to the collapse of a bathhouse hints at a budding sexuality -- they accept their disciplining and resolve to do better.

Ye refuses to be dogmatic -- perhaps because he knows that tragedy and horror transcend politics or sentiment, and that peace and civilization itself are fragile. Presaging the general cataclysm is an altercation between Chuchu and Xiaoman in which he demonstrates the clueless sexism of his gender; it ends with their separating. She heads for a summer camp in Belorussia, he remains at the school.

Inevitably, the Nazis invade, and the loss of innocence is as abrupt and horrific as the bullet that smashes into the head of the beautiful teacher as she's reading her class a poem. Chuchu and Xiaoman are linked in complementary tales of powerlessness: while she is held prisoner by the Nazis, he attempts to join the military but is instead evacuated to the frozen streets of Moscow to scrounge with other urchins.

This is where Ye chooses to confront the soul-destroying atrocities of war with the redemptive efforts of art. An escape attempt veers from tension to terror to startling beauty as one of the students steals a gun and he and the others mount horses and flee across the fields. Chuchu is imprisoned in a former monastery, its arched and cavernous spaces illuminated with blazing Byzantine frescoes of saints and demons. But Ye seems to suspect this aestheticizing of pain and wickedness, and he decides to put it to the test.

In a ploy that points out the vapidity of Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, the director gives the cadaverous Nazi general (Vladimir Nizmiroff) an evocative, sinister hobby. A Mengele-like doctor, he has a passion for tattooing the skin of beautiful young girls with lurid Nazi regalia. When, in a scene of competing revulsion and sensuality, his most recent subject proves ungrateful after he exposes his work on her to a room of drunken revelers, the general seizes on Chuchu. She's dragged to a freezing hall, stripped, strapped to a table, and anesthetized. She awakens to find that the oppressor's soul has, in his words, been immortalized on her back.

Xiaoman's situation is not so dramatic. After surviving for a time by selling his blood to buy potatoes, he lands the uncoveted job of delivering death notices to the survivors of soldiers killed in action. When he arrives at the apartment of a little girl whose mother has died, he destroys the letters, takes the girl with him, and composes his own letters full of hope and glory.

Both characters embody the pathos and the strength of the imagination when confronted by the unthinkable. Chuchu, the unwilling canvas for a sadistic madman, becomes a memorial to all those who suffered similarly. Xiaoman's fictions are a solace to those without any other and a weapon for those without power. Like the film itself, which is based on true stories, the two characters demonstrate blasphemous and redeeming means of humanizing what is all too human.