''Back to 1942'' is a 2012 Chinese historical film directed by

Feng Xiaogang Feng Xiaogang (; born 18 March 1958 in Beijing) is a Chinese film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and politician. He is well known in China as a highly successful commercial filmmaker whose comedy films do consistently well at the box of ...

. It is based on

Liu Zhenyun Liu Zhenyun (born May 1958) is a Chinese novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his novel ''Someone to Talk To'' (awarded the 2011 Mao Dun Literature Prize) as well as his involvement with the many film adaptions of his books. Among th ...

's novel ''Remembering 1942'', and is about a major famine in Henan, China, during the

Second Sino-Japanese War The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) or War of Resistance (Chinese term) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Th ...

. On 11 November 2012, the film premiered at the

International Rome Film Festival International Rome Film Fest is a film festival that takes place in Rome during the month of October. The name in Italian is Festa del Cinema di Roma. Sections The Rome Film Festival official program is divided into several sections: Cinema d'Og ...

. The film was selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, but was not nominated.

Plot

The film is set in

Henan Henan (; or ; ; alternatively Honan) is a landlocked province of China, in the central part of the country. Henan is often referred to as Zhongyuan or Zhongzhou (), which literally means "central plain" or "midland", although the name is al ...

, China in the winter of 1942, during the

. Master Fan is a wealthy landlord in a village in Henan. When the village is suffering from famine, Fan still has plenty of food to feed his family and the villagers. A group of bandits come and rob the village, eventually burning it down to the ground. Fan's son dies in the process of stopping the bandits. Fan flees his hometown with his daughter, wife and daughter-in-law. They are accompanied by a servant, Shuanzhu. While they are fleeing to the west, they meet Xialu, a fellow villager, and the latter's family. They decide to travel together, but Fan's food supply and money are stolen by NRA soldiers amidst the chaos caused by Japanese bombing. Brother Sim insists on preaching the Catholic faith in the starving province. After surviving a few Japanese bombings and witnessing many innocent people dying, he takes refuge under Father Megan but starts doubting the presence of God. Meanwhile, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

'' correspondent Theodore H. White treks to Henan to investigate the famine. He discovers that while people are dying every day and some have even resorted to cannibalism, the Nationalist Government is still not doing anything to help the refugees. Chiang Kai-shek even wants to give up defending Henan, leaving the refugees to the Japanese. White's report is eventually published in the magazine, causing the Nationalist Government to make a U-turn on their policy. However, when relief supplies are being distributed in the province, the local officials and soldiers start fighting over who should receive a larger share. The plight of Master Fan continues as his family members die one by one. He is eventually forced to sell his daughter into prostitution in return for food. Losing hope on life, he heads back to the east in the hope of dying somewhere near his home. On his way back, he meets a little girl who has just lost her mother. He adopts the girl as his granddaughter and they continue their journey.

Cast

Zhang Guoli Zhang Guoli (born 17 January 1955) is a Chinese actor and film director who was a ''xiangsheng'' actor before he started working on films and television series. He is mostly known for his roles playing the Emperor in various dramas involving Qin ...

as Master Fan * Chen Daoming as Chiang Kai-shek *

Li Xuejian Li Xuejian (; born February 20, 1954) is a Chinese actor. He played the role Song Jiang in ''The Water Margin'', a 1998 television series adapted from the Chinese classical novel of the same title. Li also played the roles of military personne ...

as Li Peiji *

Zhang Hanyu Zhang Hanyu (born 19 December 1964) is a Chinese actor. Zhang became the first Chinese actor to win the "Grand Slam", winning Best Actor trophies from the Golden Horse Awards, Golden Rooster Awards, Hundred Flowers Awards and Huabiao Awards. L ...

as Brother Sim * Fan Wei as Ma *

Feng Yuanzheng Feng Yuanzheng (; born November 16, 1962 in Beijing) is a Chinese actor. Selected filmography *1995: ''Postman'' *1998: '' Records of Kangxi's Travel Incognito'' *2003: ''Purple Butterfly'' *2004: ''A World Without Thieves'' *2004: ''Shanghai ...

as Xialu *

Xu Fan Xu Fan (, born 16 August 1967) is a Chinese actress and Asian Film Awards winner. She married film director Feng Xiaogang Feng Xiaogang (; born 18 March 1958 in Beijing) is a Chinese film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and politician ...

as Huazhi *

Tim Robbins Timothy Francis Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for portraying Andy Dufresne in the film '' The Shawshank Redemption ''(1994), and has won an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards for his rol ...

as Bishop Megan *

Adrien Brody Adrien Nicholas Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor. He received widespread recognition and acclaim after starring as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's '' The Pianist'' (2002), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Acto ...

as Theodore H. White * Yao Jingyi as Lingdang * Peng Jiale as Liubao * Li Qian as Master Fan's daughter-in-law * Yuan Huifang as Master Fan's wife * Zhang Shaohua as Xialu's mother *

Wang Ziwen Wang Ziwen (, born 28 February 1987), also known by her English name Olivia Wang and now as Ava Wang, is a Chinese actress. She is most known for portraying Qu Xiaoxiao in the popular Chinese television drama ''Ode to Joy'' and as Xuxu in ''When ...

as Master Fan's daughter Xingxing * Zhang Mo as Shuanzhu * Zhao Yi as Master Fan's son * Zhang Shu as Dong Jiayao * Tian Xiaojie as middle-aged officer * Ke Lan as

Soong Mei-ling Soong Mei-ling (also spelled Soong May-ling, ; March 5, 1898 – October 23, 2003), also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek or Madame Chiang, was a Chinese political figure who was First Lady of the Republic of China, the wife of Generalissimo a ...

Zhang Guoqiang Zhang Guoqiang ( Chinese: 张国强; Pinyin: Zhang Guoqiáng; born September 30, 1969) is a Chinese actor. Childhood Zhang was born to a family of entertainers. His mother's grandfather was a famous Pingju (a kind of Chinese folk opera) perform ...

as Dong Yingbin * Yu Zhen as Jiang Dingwen * Chang Chen-kuang as Zhang Lisheng * Lin Yongjian as County Magistrate Yue *

Duan Yihong Duan Yihong (; born May 16, 1973) is a Chinese actor best known for his role as Yuan Lang in '' Soldiers Sortie'' (2006), Long Wenzhang in '' My Chief and My Regiment'' (2009), and Hei Wa in '' White Deer Plain'' (2011). Biography Duan Yihon ...

as Chen Bulei * Peter Noel Duhamel as

Joseph Stilwell Joseph Warren "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell (March 19, 1883 – October 12, 1946) was a United States Army general who served in the China Burma India Theater during World War II. An early American popular hero of the war for leading a column walking o ...

* James A. Beattle as Clarence E. Gauss * Luo Yang as

Soong Ching-ling Rosamond Soong Ch'ing-ling (27 January 189329 May 1981) was a Chinese political figure. As the third wife of Sun Yat-sen, then Premier of the Kuomintang and President of the Republic of China, she was often referred to as Madame Sun Yat-sen. ...

Qiao Zhenyu Qiao Zhenyu (, born 1 November 1978) is a Chinese actor who is a graduate of the Beijing Dance Academy. Career In 2000, Qiao made his debut in the film ''Soaring Dragon Leaping Tiger''. The same year, he filmed his first television drama ''Xin ...

as Secretary Han * Li Xiaozhou as Sun Ciwei * Zhang Jie as Li Peiji's secretary * Nathaniel Boyd as American embassy translator * Chen Yusheng as Fang Ce * Hao Jianmin as Zhang Guangyu * Yu Genyi as Lu Daping * Zhang Dongsheng as Luo Zhen * Jiang Yanming as Luo Wu * Zhang Zhijian as Zhang Fang * Lü Zhong as Zhang Fang's mother * Jie Bing as Li Fukuan * Yasuyuki Hirata as

Yasuji Okamura was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army, and commander-in-chief of the China Expeditionary Army from November 1944 to the end of World War II. He was tried but found not guilty of any war crimes by the Shanghai War Crimes Tribunal after the ...

* Kenichi Miura as Jirou Takahashi

Alec Su Alec Su You-peng (born 11 September 1973) is a Taiwanese actor, singer, television producer, and film director. Su became a popular teen idol in the 1980s as a member of the boyband '' Xiao Hu Dui''. He was known as the "Obedient Tiger" (乖� ...

's scenes as

T. V. Soong Soong Tse-vung, more commonly romanized as Soong Tse-ven or Soong Tzu-wen (; 4 December 1894 – 25 April 1971), was a prominent businessman and politician in the early 20th-century Republic of China, who served as Premier. His father was Char ...

were deleted in the final cut of the film.

Reception

''Back to 1942'' received mixed reviews. It has a 40% approval rating on the

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang ...

, based on 10 reviews with an average rating of 5.2/10.

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

gave the film a score of 41/100 based on six reviews. Xan Brooks of ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' wrote: Dan Fainaru of '' Screen Daily'' wrote: Giovanni Vimercati of the China Internet Information Center wrote: Daniel Eagan of ''

Film Journal ''Film Journal International'' was a motion-picture industry trade magazine published by the American company Prometheus Global Media. It was a sister publication of '' Adweek'', '' Billboard'', '' The Hollywood Reporter'', and other periodica ...

'' wrote: Neil Genzlinger of

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

wrote:

Awards

The film won the A.I.C. Award for Best Cinematography during its premiere at the

in November 2012, and the Golden Butterfly Award. The movie won both Best Feature Film Award and Visual Effects Award at the 13th Beijing International Film Festival in 2013. It also won the Best Film of Mainland and Taiwan at the 32nd Hong Kong Film Awards in 2013.

References

External links