E-Mail This Article to a Friend Face to face Lou Ye’s elusive Butterfly is worth chasing BY MATTIAS FREY
	Purple Butterfly Written and directed by Lou Ye. With Ziyi Zhang, Tôru Nakamura, and Liu Ye. In Mandarin, Japanese, and Vietnamese with English subtitles. (127 minutes) All week at the Brattle.

Twice over the course of Lou Ye’s Purple Butterfly, the camera lingers over shots of photographs. Caught obliquely in a subtle chiaroscuro, a finger presses each image’s scratched surface into the best angle to the light before flipping to the next photo.

These compositions suggest how Lou’s historical drama works in miniature. Purple Butterfly unfolds as an album of emotive snapshots: billowing cigarette smoke, forsaken alley ways, hissing trains, and above all Ziyi Zhang’s tear-stained face. Known to international audiences from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers, Zhang is now China’s biggest movie star, and Lou’s camera pays lavish homage to her face in tender close-ups. The Hungarian humanist and cinéaste Béla Balázs wrote that "good close-ups are lyrical; it is the heart, not the eye, that has perceived them." Lou’s close-ups retrieve the meaning that Balázs ascribes to the device in silent films like Carl Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc: Zhang’s entrancing physiognomy functions as the film’s melody.

The story is one of political intrigue in 1930s Shanghai. Zhang’s Cynthia is a telephone switchboard operator and member of the Purple Butterfly, a radical underground group attempting to sabotage the Japanese occupation. Itami (Tôru Nakamura), her Japanese ex-lover, returns to the city as an intelligence operative charged with rooting out the resistance. As the two hasten toward violent extremes, a man named Szeto (Liu Ye) gets caught between them in a web of Hitchcockian mistaken identity.

Unlike the typical historical film’s recourse to pedantic exposition, however, plot in Purple Butterfly is always elusive and secondary. Lou’s elliptical narrative is a by-product of editing that adheres to the logic of movement, colors, and shapes, leaving you with luscious atmospherics and ample interpretative space. The camera takes a butterfly’s-eye view, fluttering in and out of shallow focus and leaving one scene through a window to pick up on another. There is no real explanation of where the characters come from, and little dialogue, but neither is needed: Lou is more concerned with evoking a sense of time and space. His visual treatment of Shanghai is so rich, in fact, that I wish he had discarded dialogue altogether. The city appears gloriously run down in shabby hide-outs, claustrophobic brothels, and rain-swept streets. Like Balázs’s close-ups, these settings overload the eye; they even come across as tactile. In recent cinema, only Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love has conveyed a richer sense of urban space in East Asian cinema.

The initial scenes bound through rapid cuts and shadowy, unfamiliar interiors, but the editing is so precise that each second of celluloid communicates an entire story. Forgoing long speeches by shrill dictators and grand panoramas of imperial parades, Lou, with the aid of superb performances by his actors, intimates an epic tale of romance and murder with an economic cinematic language of melancholic looks and nostalgic glances. True, Jörg Lemberg’s score teeters toward pathos at moments when the visuals call for restraint. And the red-paint blood and the histrionic howling seem to be trying to say something about brutality in wartime. But it’s as if these conscious "statements" were a deliberate disruption of the film’s ambiance. Lou is a suggestive filmmaker, and these splatter sequences seem to tell more than show.

The exception proves the rule. At the very end, as the narrative around Cynthia winds down in an elegant, two-minute Steadicam shot along a burning Shanghai avenue, there is an abrupt cut to black-and-white newsreel footage of the Japanese bombings of these very Shanghai streets. This conclusion is Lou’s admission — after two hours of stylization and artifice — that violence cannot be æstheticized in a swirl of moody romance. If Zhang’s face is the film’s melody, its æthereal visual refrain refigured in various emotive keys, then the documentary dénouement provides a coda grounded in the history’s real life.