On Oct. 1, 1942, a Japanese freighter carrying over 1,800 British POWs captured during the Battle of Hong Kong was torpedoed by an American sub. The chaos that followed — wherein members of the Japanese army shot any prisoner aiming to swim to safety while a slew of fishing boats helped in their rescue — resulted in more than 800 of those British soldiers dying. Tracing that little-known event and the vast grief it left behind in the UK, Fang Li’s “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” nevertheless feels like a dull history lesson that’s truncated by its many ambitions.
Li is front and center in his documentary. The trained geophysicist-turned-filmmaker has spent much of his life exploring the world underwater. That’s how he’d first learned about the Lisbon Maru, whose remains were believed to still be at the bottom of the ocean, never having been found nor studied — nor, as it happens, accurately located.
Driven by a desire to explore that sunken vessel, he opens “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” with a drive to exhume its history in a similar vein. Here was a relic and a history in need of further examination. The film takes it upon itself to tell that history (with the aid of gorgeous painterly, hand-drawn animation). But it also wants to track Li’s search for the vessel, as well as any survivors they can find (only two still lived while the doc was being shot; they’ve since passed), as well as their descendants.
This Chinese doc wants to be both an oral history of the event at hand and a record of the grief of those who lost family there — all framed by Li’s own pet marine exploration endeavor. And at close to two hours, those various strands push film and filmmaker alike in often opposing (when not outright overlapping) directions, leading to needless repetition that blunts the very purpose of Li’s project. This is an excavation of history but Li spends perhaps too much time walking us through how the excavation happened rather than letting his results (like the many teary-eyed interviews he has with descendants of the survivors) speak for themselves. There’s a constant and consistent need for self-congratulation that dampens the research on display here.
A key problem with “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” is a structural one. Throughout the film, Li insists on the main value his documentary has: It is telling a story few people know, one that’s seldom been told, let alone documented. Yet time and time again, his own sources contradict such a statement. He interviews Tony Banham, a historian who wrote an entire book that shares a title with his documentary (published back in 2006). He uses recorded testimonials by some of the survivors of the Lisbon Maru who have since died, that were compiled as oral histories of that pivotal event. He even stages a gotcha segment where he interviews bystanders on the streets in the U.K. and asks them about whether they know about the Lisbon Maru, a scene that feels better suited to a late-night skit than a framing device for a history-driven documentary (especially one so focused on the cruelty exacted by the Japanese military against a slew of British POWs).
There are two powerful and intriguing documentaries lurking within Li’s film: Those recorded first-person testimonials are harrowing to listen to, and Li’s choice to dramatize the soldiers’ increasingly hopeless plight aboard the freighter with simple animated tableaus is incredibly effective. It allows the focus to remain on the immediacy of their experiences, threading together complementary accounts from many of the survivors. (It’s the sheer number of those English-language testimonials that no doubt led to the film’s rejection as China’s submission for the best international feature Oscar this year.)
Likewise, the focus on the grief felt by those families of those soldiers who never returned home, centers the story on the generational trauma warfare unwittingly creates. But in shuttling back and forth between the two — after a protracted first half that spends much of its runtime not telling us the story, but recounting how Li and his crew found the witnesses needed to tell it — the documentary continually blunts its impact.
In essence, here is a fascinating bit of history about the Pacific War that’s muddled by Li’s desire to make the very construction of his documentary the framework of said history. Like many documentarians before him who believe their own journey is as deserving as that of the history they’re telling, he centers himself in a tale that, by his own admission, is so much bigger and more far-reaching than one would initially think. World War 2 buffs will no doubt find plenty to admire in this assemblage — may even be encouraged to seek out the many sources Li cites on screen — but as a nonfiction film, “The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru” lacks the rigor its subject matter deserves.
