Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and based on the autobiography of the same name, the film depicts the heroic struggle of Eric Lomax, a British soldier whom, along with his comrades, becomes a Japanese prisoner of war after being told to surrender in Singapore.
Sent to a Prisoner
of War Camp, he becomes part of the team working on the Thai Burma Railway.
Notoriously known as the Death Railway, the line was built to support Japanese
forces in World War II and was constructed largely from the forced labor of
Asian workers and allied prisoners.
During his imprisonment, the young Lomax, portrayed by
Jeremy Irvine and later Colin Firth, is tortured by the Kempeitai for his role
in constructing a makeshift radio used in a desperate attempt to listen to broadcasts from home. Like Germany’s Nazi Gestapo, the Kempeitai
functioned as a sort of undercover military police and it is here that the film
depicts harrowing scenes of physical abuse as the captured soldiers become an “army
of ghosts”. As a skilled engineer, Lomax escapes the horrific physical labor forced
on the emancipated frames of the soldiers whose task it is to dig out the inhospitable landscape to pave a way for the tracks.
The horrors are inconceivable.
The film is
really two stories brought together, that of a man’s personal revenge in
setting out to find those responsible for his torture, as well as the love
story between Firth and Nicole Kidman, who plays Lomax’s wife. Still haunted by
his harrowing experiences, the romantic frame story follows Lomax and his wife
Patti as they attempt to deal with Lomax’s post-traumatic stress. The
war might be over but he is still “fighting a war within
himself".
Lomax channels
his trauma into an obsessive devotion to trains and their timetables, an obsession which began in boyhood and it is
on a train to Scotland that Patti and Lomax first meet. Trains are a constant backdrop to the film's
narrative, reminding us of the human lives sacrificed for industrial and economic
development, not just in this instance, but throughout time.
The film cumulates with Lomax returning to the scene of his persecution to confront his abuser, Japanese officer Takashi Nagase, portrayed by Hiroyuki Sanada, who is still alive and working in a museum dedicated to memorialising those killed in the building of the railway. The hate we should feel for his character is set against the portrait of an equally disturbed man: like Lomax he is a mere fragment of his former self, living out a dispossessed existence due to the unrelenting regret of his past actions, carried out under circumstances none of us will ever be able to understand. Indeed, the film's success lies in its questioning of morality and acquittal. We are angered that Nagase is able to escape retribution, never having been tried for his crimes, but if Lomax can forgive his abuser then surely we can?
What follows is an incredible true story of human compassion and reconciliation.
The real Eric Lomax and his former torturer
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