Still, this soldier, played by Tong Dawei, comes across more believable than he would have been if he had picked a fight with Bale's character.
Their confrontation is brief, and Tong shows much restraint in entrusting a very youthful fellow soldier to the courtesans.
The soldiers' sacrifice is directly linked to the fate of the schoolgirls, yet receives just the right amount of screen emphasis.
On the other hand, the courtesans' sacrifice, just like their initial selfishness, is played up to a tee so that it borders on melodramatic overkill. There is a lot of contrast for the sake of contrast, with the humanity of the courtesans glinting from only a few scenes.
Not all flourishes are over the top, though. The dream sequence where they sing their brothel song in a showgirl-style lineup is unexpectedly powerful as an emotional climax.
The glamorous role of Yu Mo, played by newcomer Ni Ni, has received the strange combination of underexposure and over-hype - that is, by keeping her public appearances to the minimum yet leaking praise of her so-called breakthrough performance.
While it is an auspicious debut, it hardly measures up to what Tang Wei achieved in Lust, Caution, which is what the publicity machine has been touting.
Glamour conceals the lack of depth here.
If a scene requires only one emotion, she is quite competent. Also, crisp as her reading of English lines is, she seems foreign to the art of the pause.
Speaking of foreign language, the film has at least half of the dialogues in English. The use of modern terms like "whatever" as an American teenage colloquialism or "makeover" in the subtitles can be distracting to discerning native speakers.
Don't get me wrong. My nitpicking does not push me to the conclusion that The Flowers of War is not a good film.
It is quite good and worth a trip to your local movie theater.
It just fails to attain the greatness this filmmaker and this subject deserve. It is not a masterpiece, such as on a par with Schindler's List by Steven Spielberg or The Pianist by Roman Polanski.
For my taste, it is not as agonizing or soul-searching as Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death - even though both share quite a few character types like the whore with a heart of gold and the unwilling collaborator.
For a subject of such emotional intensity, The Flowers of War is strangely deficient in emotional impact. It was more calculated than inspired.
Many of the above-mentioned flaws could have been forgivable if the movie had more spontaneity and did not flirt with bathos.
However, melodrama is popular with a wide swathe of the populace, people who are cushioned by a daily dose of television series and, therefore, may well embrace such treatment.
Overall, Zhang Yimou's master craftsmanship is on full display here.
The story is tightly knit, and 141 minutes do not feel long at all. What everyone can expect is the visual splendor that Zhang serves so abundantly in almost every one of his oeuvres.
Whether this adds to the gritty portrayal of the brutality of war or curtails the power of narration is another matter.
However, there are places Zhang's virtuosity is tampered by some clumsy strokes.
A team of Chinese soldiers is depicted as falling one by one so that the last one can get close enough to the enemy tank to blow it up. This amazing act of ultimate heroism is preceded by a voiceover explaining why they choose to do so - an intrusive voiceover rather than a natural dialogue among soldiers for exposition. Is it the result of underestimating audience intelligence or over-reliance on a bag of old tricks?
In the end, one has to ask: Does this movie shed new light on humanity and make you a better person? I'm sure many people will say yes.
Unfortunately I'm not one of them. I think Zhang Yimou could have done better.
