I have two questions about this great film and they both relate to the ending, so beware of **spoilers**. At the end after Xie Ming and Cynthia "do it" and leave the Laundry, when the camera goes off to where a girl is sitting on a bus, is that Szeto's supposedly "dead" girlfriend? Next question; after Cynthia and Itami are done dancing and he walks to the bar and lights a cig, you notice his hand is bloody. Did Cynthia stab him or something? Thanks in advance.
shareThe end is a flashback to an earlier part of the film...remember that same parade earlier and Szeto's girlfriend on the bus when she went to see him. Not sure bout your next question maybe ur right but i think its blood that probably from the wound he got earlier.
shareThe entire last scene,,,from Xie Ming and Cynthia in her room on..is a flashback.
The blood on Itami's hand is a result of his earlier gunshot injury.
"All you need is a gorilla and a dream"...'Mule Skinner Blues'
The answer to the first question:
Yes it was a flashback, and the reason for the whole scene in the end is to indicate that Cynthia was not emotionally involved for Itami (maybe the reason why the director chose to create such a separation between Itami and Cythia in the beginning) but rather, Cynthia was really in love with Xie Ming(indicated by the sexual interaction between them). And that's why Cynthia look abruptly hurt after Itami said that Xie Ming has been killed. The whole scene at the end just portrayed that before all of the operations happened, before meeting Itami, before the death of Szeto's girlfriend, Cynthia and Xie Ming were already physically and emotionally involved intended to portray the irony in the fact that he arrange for all those deaths to be with the girl yet she was in love with another.
Answer to the second question:
Actually, if Cynthia has stabbed him there would be a weapon in her hand right afterwards. With regards to that, it was a wound that was sustained before. Maybe the reason why the director portrayed it is because he had just given up his job (the security of Yamamoto) to be with this woman, and he too realized that she was not in love with him. The shot was meant to look like she stabbed him but it was meant to be a physical metaphor that she hurt him.
Watching this movie feels like playing "Hopscotch", jumping from past to present to past again, etc.
This storytelling technique could be a very useful and effective tool in the right hands. But in this case director Ye Lou succumbs totally.
The movie plot is not that complex but somehow Ye Lou manages to make a mess out of the story.
After seeing "Purple Butterfly" I've to praise directors like González Iñárritu who seems have mastered this narrative technique
Not to mention Kieslowski or Tarkovsky.
I have no problem with the sequencing in the film. It actually doesn't hinder understanding what is happening (or whether it's present or flashback) as the story remains essentially linear.
What astonishes is Zhang Ziyi and her performance. Before this was "Hero" in which she plays a character who is intended to be quite young. And after this she played a relatively young woman in "House of Flying Daggers". In this she is unglamorous (yet still beautiful) -- she "get's her hands dirty" -- in an unglamorous role. And the character is clearly older than those in "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers". And it's so different a role than those two that I'm impressed with her willingness to take risks (see on this point the difficult "Jasmine Women").
As I see her films over time, chronologically, I'm not only impressed with her acting (being male I have to FORCE myself to look beyond her beauty, her lovely face) but also with her growth and maturation as an actress. An example of the greater maturity is her performance in 2008's "Forever Enthralled".
Others have answered re. the flashback/s at the end. The blood on Itami's hand when he, at the bar, attempts to light a cigarette is from earlier, the scene in which he is with the geisha, and is shot (and the giesha killed -- a gut-wrenching scene).
It isn't a difficult technique, and the director here has no problem with it.
Why not just directly admit that you don't like the film because it shows the ugly history of Japan in China during the 1930s-1940s, and you can't handle that truth?