An epic adventure set during the final weeks of World War II in NE China, Purple Sunset is unashamedly traditional. An old-fashioned, full-throttle war movie, it's also a crowd-pleaser, winning the audience award at the 2001 Hawaii Film Festival. This is the final and best installment in Feng Xiaoning's trilogy examining wartime relations between Chinese and foreigners at various moments of 20th century history.
Purple Sunset's international cast features three main characters. Yang is a brave if unsophisticated Chinese peasant who escapes death at the hands of the Japanese occupation army. Nadja is a Russian military nurse who arrives with the invading Russian troops. And Yoko is a Japanese schoolgirl from the Japanese colony in Manchuria. Separated from the Russian army, they must trek through Chinese forests, valleys, and highlands to find their way back to safety.
Strikingly photographed by Feng in extravagant Cinemascope, with what appears to be a cast of thousands and a lavish amount of vintage military hardware, the film keeps our heroes occupied with a series of adventures: they do battle with Japanese soldiers, treacherous quicksand, a tiger and even a murderous grassfire. Their struggle to trust each other and survive together or perish separately underlines Feng's emphasis on the desperate futility of war, and the common humanity that his characters must learn.
Which doesn't prevent him from providing his film with viscerally exciting battle sequences, including a fantasy sequence that provides the opportunity to stage a rousing naval battle, complete with dogfights and exploding battleships! The film sometimes seems rather conflicted, though, as to its humanist loyalties, and manages to have it both ways at the end, providing both a striking visual affirmation of pacifism, and a final bloody revenge massacre.
Shelly Kraicer