Why was the late Martin Scorsese’s film banned in China?

“The Departed” by Martin Scorsese It’s not the most important film in the director’s oeuvre, nor is it his best (it’s not even close), but it is one of his biggest commercial successes along with being the film that finally earned him the long-awaited Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. A remake of the cop thriller “Infernal Affairs” from director Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, the film was a box office hit because it featured thrilling performances from heavyweight actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson while trafficking in the kind of visceral, visceral . Violence has been a staple of Scorsese’s mob movies. I felt like this was just for fun, and that’s exactly that. If you come across it on TV, you’ll probably stick with it until the bloody end.

Given the huge success of Infernal Affairs in Asia, Scorsese’s film may have performed strongly in the People’s Republic of China. It didn’t happen. In fact, it wasn’t a performance at all. China Film Group, one of the mainland’s major film importers, immediately rejected the film. Why? Was this a return to Scorsese’s Kundun, the brilliant biopic of the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet when China announced its intention to execute him? Was it a foolish objection, like the Chinese government did? “Back to the Future” exhibition banned Because it depicts time travel? Or is it simply because the gangsters in “The Departed” are looking to sell the technology to Chinese customers?

It wasn’t any of those things.

According to the Los Angeles TimesChina halted theatrical distribution of “The Departed” because it was stated in the film that the country could use nuclear weapons on Taiwan. Given the still unstable political situation in Taiwan (which is divided between unification with the People’s Republic of China and independent rule), this is clearly a sensitive topic for an already hypersensitive China. But Warner Bros. wasn’t that hard to beat. And “The Departed” in the future.

Over time, the film became available on DVD with a few unacceptable minutes deleted. As for Scorsese, his subsequent films have not been banned from showing in China. This is always a difficult situation, and you hate to see studios capitulate to an authoritarian government. But the content of “The Departed” does not appear to have been seriously compromised, and furthermore, it was not primarily political. It’s just a meat-and-potatoes gangster movie, served up with all the greasy trappings, but missing the thematic nuances that make Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Casino such cold masterpieces (and Martin Scorsese is our greatest living film director).