Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (2011)
Pupule rating: 3.3 (out of 4)
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I actually watched the Indonesian translation rather than fork up some dollars for the English-translation version, but that didn't lessen my enjoyment. Warriors of the Rainbow centers entirely on a tribe of Seediq warriors in the mountains of Taiwan around 1930. Imperial Japan is on its colonizing warpath, and the Seediq eventually rise up with their ultra-sharp swords and make this an unprecedented hurricane of beheadings.
That's not why I like this film. Maybe from a historian's perspective, the uprising was unveiled too quickly. For most viewers, 2 hours and 34 minutes is plenty enough time to observe and grasp the essence of the tribe, of its leader, of its day-to-day machinations before and during the Imperial occupation. The complexities of basically being imprisoned, of intermarriage, even of enlisting to work in the Imperial army.
The lead role is played by Lin Ching-Tai, a Taiwanese aboriginal who looks more Polynesian and Austronesian than Chinese. His mother is native (aboriginal) and he is a Christian minister off camera. This was his first movie as an actor, and though the script didn't ask him to display a variety of emotions, he was perfect for this role.
There is still a lot of disagreement about where Polynesians originated from, but the tattoos, the linguistics and relics point to Vietnam or Taiwan as launching pads before the voyage began. It is fascinating to see it up close, a culture that is now a sliver of what it used to be there in Taiwan.
The resistance plays out on film with a simmer, then a gradual boil. Very rarely does the aspect of revenge play out so satisfyingly on screens. In just about any other wrinkle of life, vengeance does not merit this kind of glorification. With it come repercussions. In this production, though, it can be glorious, and in the hands of the Seediq, it is delicious.
My personal thoughts about Japan and its outright denial of pre-war and wartime atrocities across East Asia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere are the same as ever. Japan's schoolbooks have virtually no mention of the bloodshed, the beheadings, the rapes, the destruction from Manchuria to the Philippines and everything in between. But this take on what happened in Taiwan is new for me, and the rebellion was tantalizing to see.
It ends badly for the Seediq, who were outgunned and outmanned, and even had to fight off their rival tribe — which took more Seediq lives than the Imperial Japanese did. The Seediq took down Imperial fascists with incredible calculation and efficiency in that mountain forest. The mass suicide by the Seediq mothers, who also cut their babies' lives short, rather than surrender, is heartbreaking.
This is not a film for young kids, but there is a brutality in the historical lesson here that a book or rated-G documentary could never match.
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