When 'Devils on the Doorstep' was released in 2000, it was banned in China and its director, Jiang Wen, prohibited from directing any more movies for an unstated period of time. As it turned out, Jiang didn't direct another film until 2007. The film is set in a North Chinese town toward the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945. Apparently, the Chinese censors felt the film didn't cast the Japanese occupiers in a negative enough light as well as failing to depict the Chinese villagers as heroes.'Devils' is an unusual in that most of the film is a black comedy. The way Jiang depicts the Japanese occupation is quite different than the 'Rape of Nanking'. Here, the Japanese have occupied the small town of 'Rack-Armor Terrace' and have already settled in for eight years. There's no reign of terror here as the Japanese soldiers spend most of their time parading their musically-inept Navy band around town, who only happen to know one tune. Despite their contempt for the village they're in charge of, they basically leave the villagers to their own devices. The villagers are more upset about the lack of grain than the conduct of the Japanese soldiers.All that changes when an apparent partisan leaves a Japanese soldier and his Chinese collaborator-interpreter on the doorstep of our villager protagonist, Ma Dasan, tied up in gunny sacks, with orders to interrogate them and wait for his return, five days later, when presumably he'll return and take custody of them again. The partisan threatens both Dasan and his fellow villagers with death, if he doesn't cooperate.The captured Japanese soldier, Hanaya, is a caricature of the fanatical type of World War II Japanese soldier, often depicted in American propaganda movies during World War II. The Chinese interpreter, Hanchen, fearing that the villagers will kill both of them, intentionally mistranslates Hanaya's belligerent words, so that his captors will get the impression that he's actually benign (the joke of the villagers misinterpreting Hanaya's intentions, goes on for way too long). Ma Dasan informs his fellow villagers of his quandary and they agree that Ma Dasan should keep the captured soldiers in his cellar.After six months goes by and the partisan fails to return, the villagers agree to cast lots, to determine who amongst them, should execute the prisoners. Ma Dasan ends up being chosen but doesn't have the gumption to kill his captives, so he hides them in a watchtower along the Great Wall of China and brings them food and water. The villagers discover Ma Dasan's ruse when the prisoners fail in an escape attempt so they decide to hire an assassin, a bumbling, retired executioner by the name of 'One Stoke Liu'. Liu is completely incompetent and misses when he tries to slice off the prisoners' heads. At this point, one can hardly take the film seriously at all, as the characters (exemplified by such a buffoon), appear to be a bunch of bumbling fools. The same goes for two Japanese soldiers, who fail in their obsessive quest to capture a chicken as well as Ma Dasan's fellow villagers, who are constantly engaged in one petty argument after another.After Hanaya miraculously transforms himself from fanatic to grateful fan of his captors, he proposes that if the villagers release him, he'll approach the Japanese commander (Sakatsuka) and ask for two wagons of grain for the town. The ensuing scenario fails as satire, since it's too detached from reality. I can see why the Chinese censors took Jiang to task as no Chinese villager would be stupid enough to bring a captured Japanese prisoner back to a commanding officer, expecting not to be punished and worse, hope that said Commander ends up rewarding them, for their actions.Hanaya ends up as the one who's punished, as his death has already been reported to his hometown (where a memorial has been erected) and to now reveal that he's still alive (and was a prisoner of the Chinese to boot), would be a great humiliation for Sakatsuka and his unit. In a most unlikely reversal, Sakatsuka agrees to keep the agreement Hanaya made with the villagers and ends up giving them not just two wagons of grain, but an additional four.If all this seems unbelievable, Jiang decides to shift gears at film's end, dispensing with the overall comic tone. The jarring transition between black comedy and serious drama would have been much more effective had he had a little more empathy for his characters to begin with. So when things get 'serious', and the stakes are raised, we don't care much for what happens to characters who end up as tragic victims.As the plot unfolds, Sakatsuka turns on the villagers when they fail to produce the man who captured Hanaya to begin with and believes Ma Dasan has gone off to fetch some partisans. The paranoid outburst leads to the villagers being massacred (including a Japanese soldier murdering a young child) despite the fact that Sakatsuka already knows that Japan has surrendered.The coda is just as gruesome. Hanchen is executed by the Nationalists and Ma Dasan cracks up, and attacks Japanese POWs. Soldiers prevent him from hacking Hanaya to death and in a cruel twist, Major Gao, the Chinese Nationalist in charge, has Hanaya behead Ma Dasan, as punishment for his crimes.Jiang pulls out all the stops at irony, when a transformed Hanaya is forced to execute Ma Dasan, the good man who saved him but who went mad due to the cruelties of war. Jiang did well not to show the Chinese as completely heroic as the censors wanted, but went too far by turning them (along with the Japanese occupiers) into buffoons. When death finally came to the characters whom Jiang wanted us to laugh at earlier, their sudden demise hardly seemed tragic at all.

I will agree with my fellow reviewers that this is indeed a very well-made film. It is well-shot, well-acted, thoroughly moving and at times amusing. The way it lulls the audience into a false sense of security is very skillful, and I was genuinely speechless and rooted in place when the climactic, but not final, scene came along. This is something that despite watching countless films, I am not accustomed to.HOWEVER, I am absolutely astounded that nobody else has read this as a horribly dehumanising account of the Japanese. Before anybody starts saying that the Japanese army in WWII committed some horrific atrocities, I know this full well. However, it is the way that this film goes about portraying this message will truly disturbs me in a fashion that is cinematically brilliant and all the more worrying for that reason.The Japanese soldier who is captured by the villagers is well-crafted. To begin with, he is understandably somewhat uncooperative with his captors. However, over time his human side comes out in often comic fashion, and we begin to develop some kind of sympathy for him and feel that he has come to develop sympathy for his captors. Unfortunately, this is all utterly shattered later. Likewise, the Japanese general initially impresses us with his sense of honour despite his fierce nature. Again he is set up as somebody who has developed some kind of sympathy for the villagers and has acted honourably. But, without spoiling the latter part of the film, he then completely derails any such thoughts and proves that, deep down, he is a completely evil swine. His logic for his acts is utterly ludicrous, and demonises the Japanese. This film is let down by the fact that it portrays the Japanese as pure evil. It suggests that even when they seem nice on the outside, they are still backstabbing devils.I understand that the Chinese are very bitter, and rightfully so, for the atrocities committed against them by the Japanese during WWII. And I don't blame them whatsoever for showing this side of the Japanese army. After all, our own cinema has repeatedly and rightly depicted the Nazis as evil. However, what concerns me is the total lack of any of the Japanese characters coming out as in any way good people. They all, to a man, come out as barbarians. The biggest missed opportunity was for the captured soldier to refuse his order near the end and die honourably. But no. Even films about the Nazis that are as harrowing as Schindler's List have Germans we can be sympathetic with. Devils on the Doorstep, sadly, only creates a veneer of decency around some of the Japanese characters, whilst using this as an effective tool to deride their 'true nature'.I found this film very disturbing and disappointing for this reason. But, as I say, it is very well-made, and well worth watching. I just hope that viewers don't fall prey to the message beneath, and that the film has not done too much damage to already tense race relations between the Chinese and Japanese. If I had not found the film so inherently racist, I would have awarded it 8 out of 10 (I'm a harsh marker), perhaps even nine. But it will have to be a 7.Oh, and I'm confused by a previous review which claims the film is too long for the subject matter. Too long for a story about a war?!? I personally never felt it was too long.

This is the second time I see this film. As a Chinese, I feel a strong urge as well as an obligation to write some comment about it. I can safely conclude that the film vividly showed what the real situation was during the Japanese occupation in China back in WW2.It is totally different from those main-stream anti-Japanese war films we can see throughout our early life, which still can be seen being replayed in CCTV (China Central Television) over and again again. In those films, almost all Chinese, young or old, men or women, were all warriors fighting against the Japanese invaders. We all know that it wasn't true. From this film, we can see how ignorant and stupid those Chinese peasants were. It gives us a chance to review what was really going on during that time. It is a history we cannot deny. As a matter of fact, this film was banned in mainland China by some kind of a "censorship" mainly because it revealed so much truth.The director of the film, Jiangwen, is my only favorite director from China. You can say he is ambitious, a genius or whatever. But i say that he is a director with a sense of responsibility to our nation, to our people, to those heroes and civilians died in the war. He is not afraid to dig up the less-bright side of the history and present it to us, to those younger generation who never go through the war. It reminds us never to forget history.

Guizi Lai Le is such a powerful movie that really moves me. Jiang wen's great talent to express humanity in film is approved again. (For those who has not seen his debut: In the Heat of the Sun, you really should not miss it. )I read this movie as a song for humanity. The fate of characters are so dramatic but at the same time so real. Hanaya, Japanese prisoner, after being held and fed by Chinese villagers, is on the edge of being lifted from a Japanese militarism twisted spirit and turning back into a human. However, when he returns to Japanese troops camp, the humanity is ripped off by reality again. Dasan, Chinese peasant, after the villagers being slaughtered and Japanese surrender, turns into a revenging killer of Japanese prisoners and finally end up with being executed as a criminal by Hanaya. The fate of both reveals the weakness of individual in front of the war. The war is a machine and it eats up the humanity. The acting is great. I heard two Japanese actors don't want to be in the movie when they know the plot. But finally they did a good job in this movie. The performance, the set, the local dialect are all giving an authentic touch. Plus it's full of humor. Highly recommended!