Two War Movies

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The White Silk Dress and Red Sorghum Compare and contrast Directed by Luu Huynh, The White Silk Dress is about a couple, Dan and Gu, escape from their master’s households and begin raising their family in the central town of Vietnam. Under poverty, they live their peaceful family life with full of love until the war from French colonial tears them apart. During the story, there is a white silk dress, which is the Vietnamese traditional costume, meaningfully accompanies with Dan and her family since she gets it from her mother until she leaves it to her children. As an adaption of a novel by Mo Yan, “Red Sorghum” is a successful movie of Zhang Yimou. The movie, which was made in 1988, has a wonderful combination of the romantic, the violent, the symbolic and the reality in the spirit of resisting the Japanese. The movie depicts life of a woman in a rural village in war time. Living in sorghum area, Nine is forced to marry with an old man who has leprosy. After her husband’s death, she and her lover take care of his business. The rest of this story is about how people in the sorghum winery are impacted and tore apart by the invasion of Japanese. When the World War II begins, Japanese starts taking control parts of China and reconstructs the main land. In their area, while forcing villagers to flatten the sorghum, the Japanese leader decides to hang and kill some person as examples. From the witness crowd, Nine realizes one of them is Louhan, her old benefactor. In a pent fury, workers in the winery decide to trap the Japanese’s tank to revenge for Louhan. Finally, Japanese tank is destroyed and all winery workers are killed. There are only little Sanpao (Nine’s son) and Nine’s husband survive, and the movie ends with the epic scene where little Sanpao holding his father’s hand, both are surrounded by the red of blood and fury in combination with the light of
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