Empire of the Sun

My writings tend to be very autobiographical and direct in its prose. I begin to delve more into myself and more hidden areas of my mind get illuminated. Thus begins a journey into an alien yet distinctly familiar land which never seems to run out of surprises.

I few hours ago I was watching a film called as “Empire of the Sun”. The story is about the life of a boy who is caught in the crossfire between China and Japan during the Japanese takeover of China in 1941. The film like any other Spielberg film doesn’t waste a single moment to move the story ahead and the narrative progresses at a brisk speed. Yet there are instances when the film allows you to take a pause to reflect on the dreams and aspiration of the boy around whom the story revolves. The film starts portraying the realities of slow but steady collapse of China’s civil structures during the Japanese invasion, even as the British empire is shrinking rapidly and how the whole country, especially Shanghai, becomes a hostage into the hands of mighty Japanese forces. This sets a perfect stage of parallel narratives, one that of a military war and other an emotional battle fought by a little boy. As the history has unfolded, we all have witnessed how China has made Japan apologise for every single war crime of those times.

The film is a very direct narrative of the dreams and triumph thereof of an English boy whose father was a successful business man in the pre world war China. He was filthy rich and hence famous with some very important connections in the world of politics and business. Although it was common knowledge that Japan and China would soon enter into a war given the Japanese fascist ambitions during Second World War, no one actually believed that Japan would sabotage the social and political fabric of China so completely.

During the pre war scenes the film also tries to portray how British almost lived in a parallel China created to suit their comfort, stateliness and opulence. We see some very pleasing images of the British upper class enjoying Christmas together, with their sumptuous dinners and fancy dresses. We also see the images of a subservient China out to serve the British Also, there is the other part of China which is marginalised, underprivileged, and hungry, with its dark and narrow lanes where you cannot see beyond the next turn.

We see all this through the eyes of a school boy with a curious mind aspiring to become an air pilot. This film is as much about the war as it is about the little dreams of the boy. As the story progresses, his passion for flying seems to grow on him, as if everything around him seems to scheme up to turn his dreams into reality. As the music of his life, as it plays around him in the form of his little pleasures of seeing his small aspirations coming true, seems to strike a melody, the chord suddenly snaps. You are thrown in the din of utter poverty and ruthlessness of concentration camps. But the dreams of that boy still linger on and somehow life doesn’t want to deprive him of those little spells of charm when he sees his object of dreams, the fighter plane.

And this is where lies the filmmakers’ biggest triumph, the innocent belief of a boy, which never seems to renounce his aspirations in the face of doom and hopelessness. Despite many flaws in the film itself, you feel a divine touch of the indomitable spirit of life in the form of a tiny hope which never gets shaken by the blizzards of war.