Silk Ribbon

I love late summer, when the heat simmers down without losing its warmth, and the sky turns a blinding blue, with a sweet south-western breeze. Our sunflowers tower above us, the morning glory Heavenly Blue trumpets  put on their best and last showing, and there is a silence of peace and acceptance in the air that seems to come with only the last of summer's glory. This morning, the sky seemed a huge liquid silk blue ribbon, stretching over my house and my garden. I thought of a friend of mine, far away, and for a brief, magical moment, it felt like our worlds were next door to each other. As if my friend was able to reach up and touch the same silk ribbon sky as it undulated majestically past his window. It was one of those rare artistically-visually enchanting moments , silent, mesmerizing. When I was a young teenage, thirteen or fourteen, I drew and painted, before I started writing poetry and stories at age 17, and the visual beauty of the mirage of the blue silk ribbon sky reminded me of those days when my favorite way to express myself artistically was with a pencil or a paintbrush. The moment reminded me also of a visually stunning movie, set against the unlikely background of the carnage in Nanking in 1937 during the second Sino-Japanese war. "The flowers of War", directed by Zhang Yimou, and based on "13 Flowers of Nanjing" by Geling Yan, is a cinematographic jewel as it tells the unlikely alliance between an American mortician and twelve prostitutes who risk everything to save the lives of thirteen orphaned schoolgirls who found temporary refuge from the slaughter going on in Nanking by the butchering Japanese troops, where not even children are safe from murder and rape. The courage found by the mortician and  the displaced prostitutes in the face of destruction and brutal death is filmed in a stunning way, and manages to convey hope amidst constant fear and despair. They come up with a cunning and risky plan to guarantee the survival of the orphaned girls by dressing the prostitutes up like young innocent girls to save them from rape and death by the predatory officers. While the prostitutes play the role of the teenage girls, the mortician gets them out of Nanking with an old repaired truck, eluding the Japanese. It is a beautiful film, in story and vision. The cinematography by Zhao Xiaoding is gorgeous, leaving us enchanted by the ability to find beauty in the starkest of realities, war. By focusing on enhanced perception of daily circumstance and objects surrounding the characters as they navigate through the hell of their city's annihilation,  the viewer becomes both a witness and a participant. When I looked at the sky this morning, I too felt both a witness and a participant, albeit of a much more peaceful place and circumstance. By the way, Christian Bale as the mortician and Ni Ni as the de- facto leader of the prostitutes are both brilliant, so is the young actor portraying George Chen, Huang Tianyuan, who plays the young boy becoming in disguise the extra person needed to give the Japanese soldiers the number of girls they expect.