男女纠察队
Chinese film uses a kitchen to crush Hollywood’s war myth_我的网站
一 | 云南文山8月22日电 题：珠江第一港富宁港年内建成 云南通江达海再近一步 作者 韩帅南 杜潇潇 李嘉娴 一场骤雨过后，云南富宁依然暑气逼人。
The excitement is understandable. Director Wen Muye has made something quietly radical: a war film that refuses spectacle.
There is a wedding scene in Once Upon a Time in the Middle East that stays with you long after the credits. In the middle of a war zone, people still find a way to dance, embrace, and cry as if tomorrow will never come. The joy is desperate and beautiful at the same time. Watching it, you feel the ache of a simple truth: These people should have been allowed every tomorrow. That single sequence captures what director Wen Muye has achieved. He has made a film that only a Chinese filmmaker could have made - because of a sensibility that refuses to treat war as spectacle or moral theater.
The commercial response in China has been equally striking. During the past weekend the film took in 373 million yuan ($55.35 million) at the box office, over 4 times the amount earned by Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in the same market. Audiences walked out of the theater talking about war, food, and the value of ordinary life. The numbers confirm what the film itself demonstrates: a story told from the kitchen can still command a massive audience.
The story follows Xu Fu, an ordinary Chinese chef who travels to a Middle Eastern city (clearly modeled on Iraq around 2003) to work off family debt. With restaurant manager Ma Junsheng, he opens the Dragon Restaurant and serves Chinese food. Even after the invasion begins, the kitchen does not close. The kitchen becomes a fragile island where meals continue to be cooked while the war begins outside. Xu Fu is not a hero in a Hollywood sense. He does not pick up a gun or deliver speeches about freedom. He just keeps cooking.
What makes the film remarkable is how cleanly it rejects the familiar Western war narrative. Hollywood has spent decades following US soldiers into foreign cities, showing their courage, their trauma, and their brotherhood. Films like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down place the US experience at the center and often reduce the local population to a background threat or grateful recipients of rescue. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East turns the camera the other way around. It asks a blunt question spoken to an American officer: "Without you, where would the terrorists come from?" The line is not delivered as propaganda. It is offered as a practical observation about cause and effect. Violence creates more violence. Children who lose everything do not become extremists by nature; they do because the options for a normal life have been deprived.
The film makes this point through a recurring image: the knife. In Xu Fu's hands, a knife is a tool for chopping, flipping, and seasoning. It produces the bowl of "Xu Fu stew" that orphans finish and ask for more. In other hands, the same blade becomes a weapon. "The knife is not good or evil," the film suggests. "People are." The same logic applies to the children. Young Saif learns to cook under Xu Fu's guidance, kneading dough, controlling the flame, earning respect through a plate of food. Other kids the same age are packed into cars with bombs instead of books.
Here the Chinese director's approach proves smarter than the Hollywood model. Hollywood war films usually rely on scale, speed, and moral clarity: big battles, clear villains, and a central hero who grows through combat. The camera stays close to the soldiers, the soundtrack swells, and the audience is guided toward admiration or catharsis. Director Wen Muye does the opposite. He stays small, slow, and unresolved. By placing the story inside a kitchen rather than on the front line, he forces the viewer to confront the human cost without the distraction of heroic spectacle. Instead of telling us who is right, he shows us what is lost. This restraint is more demanding and ultimately more persuasive. It trusts the audience to connect the dots rather than feeding them a pre-packaged moral. Where Hollywood often ends with a sense of hard-won victory or noble sacrifice, this film leaves you with the quieter, harder realization that the real damage continues long after the shooting stops: in the minds of children and in the broken routines of daily life. That choice of focus is not just different; it is more honest and more intelligent.
This perspective feels especially Chinese in its emphasis on ordinary survival. Chinese culture has long treated food as the foundation of life: "Heaven is big, earth is big, but eating is bigger." The dishes in the film, from northeastern iron-pot stews mixed with local grilled fish to carefully prepared fried rice made from whatever ingredients remain, are not exotic decoration. They are the practical language of endurance. One of the most moving moments comes when Xu Fu cooks a simple stew for a group of orphans during their escape. What began as "leftovers not fit for the table" becomes a permanent item on the menu. Anything made with care can feed people. That idea carries more weight than any battlefield speech.
The film's approach to food and daily ritual reminds me of director Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman. Lee used elaborate family dinners to reveal emotional truths that characters could not speak aloud. Wen transplants that same quiet method into a war zone. The kitchen becomes the moral center of the story. Steam, chopping boards, and shared tables matter more than explosions. In both films, cooking is never just cooking. It is a way of insisting that human connection still exists even when larger forces try to erase it.
A quiet but powerful metaphor runs through the story: the potato. A potato is harmless until it sprouts and becomes poisonous. The children radicalized by war are not born poisonous. They become so when the soil around them turns toxic. The film returns several times to the simple instruction "don't waste food." In peacetime the phrase sounds ordinary. In a war zone it becomes a statement about the waste of human lives. War does not only kill people; it spoils what could have been good.
By the final scenes, the Dragon Restaurant has become more than a business. It is a small example that another way of existing is possible. Children are learning to cook instead of learning to kill. The film does not claim this solves geopolitics. It simply shows that the most basic human desire, to eat well and live another day, remains the clearest common language across cultures.
The author is a reporter with the Global Times. [email protected]
。地处右江上游的富宁港建设现场焊花飞溅、机器轰鸣，工人们将岸桥零件吊装入轨，门机部件在轨道旁焊接。群山环抱中，客运码头已矗立岸边，水域码头、配套建筑错落排布，这座云南规划建设的最大内陆港口，正向着年内建成的目标全力冲刺。
二 | 长久以来，云南坐拥面向南亚东南亚开放的区位优势，却面临着沿边不沿海、通江难达海的困局。传统水运仅能依托水富港沿长江东下，横跨多省市绕行上海出海，航程冗长。 富宁港地处文山州富宁县剥隘镇，正是破解这一发展困局的关键抓手。其素有“珠江第一港”之称，既是云南主动融入粤港澳大湾区、加强与广西北部湾经济区产业对接协作的前沿枢纽，更是串联粤港澳大湾区经云南通往缅甸、衔接印度洋陆海联运大通道的关键节点。 “富宁港建成后，将彻底改变云南货物只能东线出海的单一格局，构筑起一条高效便捷的全新江海联运主干通道。”云南交投富宁港投资建设有限公司党支部书记、董事长和永生告诉记者。 右江—珠江水运通道本是云南水运规划的“两出省”水运通道之一，早年因百色水利枢纽通航设施缺失导致航道断航，富宁港规划也搁置数十年。
三 | 随着西部陆海新通道上升为国家战略，百色水利枢纽通航设施、富宁港、右江百色库区(云南段)高等级航道三大工程同步启动建设。 伴随着2026年平陆运河全线通水通航，富宁港一阶段主体完工，2027年百色水利枢纽通航设施试通航，富宁港—右江—平陆运河千吨级水运通道全线打通，云南通江达海的多年愿景终成现实。 届时，千吨级船舶从富宁港起航，沿右江而下，经由百色水利枢纽通航设施，再驶入平陆运河，便可直抵北部湾海港，打通珠江水系与北部湾之间的水路通道。相较传统长江出海航线，新通道航程大幅缩短，物流周转效率显著提升。 “现在项目已经进入建设收尾的关键冲刺期。”云南交投富宁港投资建设有限公司工程合同管理部部长王开宇站在码头现场介绍，目前码头水工桩基已全部完工，集装箱码头上部结构施工完毕，陆域形成工程基本收尾；疏港公路主线路基完成95%，百标隧道实现全线贯通。 眼下施工重心集中在疏港公路路面铺筑、港池与护岸开挖、港机设备安装调试、外接电力配套等关键节点，各项工序压茬推进，确保年内完成建设任务。 在和永生看来，富宁港不只是一座港口码头，更是云南“转身向海”的战略支点。
四 | 港口立足服务绿色铝产业链，着力打造承接产业转移的供应链组织中枢。 记者从云南省交通运输厅了解到，经摸排，省内昆钢、云铝、云天化、云南能投等重点企业大宗货物年运量超9000万吨，云铝、魏桥等铝企每年数百万吨铝制品销往粤港澳，化工企业每年约300至400万吨硫黄、铝土矿等原料需从沿海进口，为右江—珠江水运通道筑牢稳定货源基础。 富宁港通航后，云南东向出海水运将实现跨越式突破。未来，文山绿色铝、滇东南矿产、高原特色农产品等大宗货物，都可以经由港口装船出海，借助江海联运通达粤港澳大湾区，辐射东盟多国市场，让云南内陆产业真正对接国际海洋贸易体系。
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