Role reversal

The "winner" here is Chen, largely due to the fact that his material instantly connects with viewers. The viral video, message boards and poorly sourced information are an omnipresent and increasingly dangerous side effect of the Internet age. We recognize the current nature of communication as well as the dog-eat-dog middle class business culture of modern China (or anywhere for that matter) the story unfolds against. Back to 1942's fatal error is its distance from its material. The events that unfold on the screen are among history's most gruesome and infuriating, but there's a clinical coldness to Feng's rendering of this particular period. Any of us can hit Google or, perish the thought, a library to learn the facts. Feng should be making us feel them. And in 1942, we don't. The film is loaded with impeccably shot panoramas (by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Lu Yue) of mass misery, which are handsome but emotionally hollow.

That said Chen and Feng are blessed with nimble casts. Feng's crew injects whatever humanity the story does find in spite of the film's overall chilly tone, with Zhang Guoli carrying the load as a man that goes from riches to rags in the most devastating way. Chen and Li do superb jobs of shading Chiang and Governor Li, deftly layering their characters with an internal conflict between what is right and what is necessary. To his credit Feng doesn't shy away from pointing the finger at official bungling and corruption as among the root causes for the famine.

Chen's cast pulls of a similar feat in drawing attention away from narrative machinations that can only happen in the movies and toward the larger point. The film falters in its melodramatic coda ripped straight out of a Korean romance but the national furor over and vilification of a young woman for a single misguided moment rings true. Yao and Chao, representing dialectically opposed viewpoints, are nicely understated and Yao in particular is never easily dismissed as simply a sensationalist, a media troll. Producer Chen is probably the most complex character, easy to write off as an entitled trophy wife, but ends up the recipient of the only "You go, sister!" moment.

Both films suffer a serious case of bloat: We know the road to Shaanxi was grueling and dangerous, and trimming the (admittedly) high-impact landscape and bomber attack sequences to make more room to connect with fewer characters would have been welcome adjustment in Back to 1942. Tim Robbins and Adrien Brody as an Irish/American/English priest (his lack of accent skills is distracting) and Time magazine reporter Theodore White respectively could have been excised entirely and nothing would have been lost. For the sheer amount of plot, Caught in the Web moves slowly in segments that simply restate earlier facts. But watching a filmmaker like Chen rip into the world we know as opposed to the world gone by is a treat that's worth a little patience.

Back to 1942 and Caught in the Web opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.