After premiering to enormous acclaim at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize (equivalent to second place), Jiang Wen's Devils On The Doorstep soon became an orphan, suppressed by Chinese censors who not only banned it, but have kept actor-director Jiang from working since. Though shorn of 20 minutes for its U.S. debut, the film's wry comic portrait of the Japanese Occupation during WWII hasn't lost any of its incendiary brilliance, both as a political provocation and as a brusquely humane take on the horrors and absurdity of war. Adopting a tone somewhere between the Ealing comedies and Stanley Kubrick's antiwar classic Paths Of Glory, Jiang uses humor as a back route into the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army against Chinese peasants, opening up old wounds between two countries with already tenuous diplomatic relations. The "devils" of the title are the Japanese invaders, but the label shifts in meaning as the story progresses; as with Kubrick's film, humans have a broad capacity for good and evil during wartime, but most of the savagery comes from the top, leaving foot-soldiers to twist in the wind. The director himself stars as the put-upon hero, a peace-loving peasant who seems content to lead a cozy life with his mistress (Jiang Hongbo) in a tiny village nestled against the Great Wall. His only reminder of the Occupation is the parade of Japanese soldiers that passes through town intermittently, slinging candy at the local schoolchildren. But one night, a gunman breaks into his home and leaves behind two Japanese prisoners in burlap sacks, one an official translator (Yuan Ding) who will do anything to live and the other an unrepentant soldier (Kagawa Teruyuki) who would rather die than suffer the dishonor of Chinese capture. Creative translation keeps the prisoners alive for months after the gunman promised to return, but Jiang and the other villagers are forced into a lose-lose decision to either kill the men or set them free. The interplay between the translator and the soldier makes for a hilarious Laurel & Hardy routine, with the latter's obscene invective twisted into deranged-sounding niceties. ("Japs sound the same whether they're angry or happy," the translator explains.) Jiang could have settled for this endlessly amusing comic premise, but Devils On The Doorstep shifts gears in its startling final act, expanding into a grimly ironic treatment of the madness of war and the poor innocents swept up by the forces of history. More than 50 years after the Occupation, Jiang has found enough distance to mine some laughs from his absurd scenario, but his fresh dread and indignation keeps them stuck in the throat.