It's 1945 in the northern village of Rack Armour Terrace, and the local peasants maintain an uneasy harmony with the Japanese garrison, whose leaders parade by daily on horseback dispensing candy to kids, brass ensemble in tow. The trouble starts one night when credulous, bumbling hero Ma Dasan (played by the director) is interrupted mid-tryst by a rap on the door. An unseen man who identifies himself only as "Me" entrusts Dasan with two squirming burlap sacks for safekeeping, saying he will return in a few days. The contents, much to the consternation of the excitable villagers: a Japanese soldier and his Chinese interpreter.

Shot in rich, shadowy black-and-white, Devils chronicles, with increasingly amused irony, the relationship between reluctant captors and befuddled captives. While the humiliated Japanese prisoner spits vitriol in the hope that his custodians will kill him, the terrified aide mistranslates the invective as supplicating jabber, and everyone is only too happy to use racist stereotyping to smooth over the confusion. "Japs sound the same whether they're happy or angry," the interpreter explains. After weeks, there's still no sign of the mysterious "Me," and the peasants, resentful at having to keep alive their unwanted guests, convene for one clownish brainstorming session after another; the semi-slapstick botched schemes culminate in a plan to return the hostages to the Japanese army in exchange for grain.

Jiang, who played Gong Li's lover in Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum (1987) and directed the highly regarded if little-seen In the Heat of the Sun (1994), gives a powder-keg performance, all double takes and lunging motions, and his direction is no less robust. With a camera that charges into the thick of the frequently erupting commotions, the movie exists in a state of constant disorientation, the better to orchestrate its sardonic reversals.

In a press-kit interview, Jiang concedes that Devils belongs to the "Chinese tradition of anti-Japanese war movies." The Film Bureau disagreed, censuring Jiang for his overly sympathetic portrayal of the invaders; they also failed to appreciate the brief nudity and a much deployed epithet that the subtitles render as "turtlefucker." (The movie was temporarily pulled from circulation after its 2000 premiere at Cannes, where it won the second-place Grand Prix—it was then nearly three hours and is now, owing to producer mandates, a snappy 140 minutes.)

Though it mounts a head-on critique of xenophobia (and does show the Japanese captive briefly bonding with the villagers over their mutual peasantry), it's safe to say that Devils on the Doorstep will do nothing to ease Sino-Japanese relations. The final hour amply illustrates the Japanese military's murderous brutality, though Jiang's larger project is to simulate the volatile madness of wartime mentality—nowhere more so than in the nerve-racking, party-hearty buildup to the concluding roundelay of carnage. The film ends, logically, in a pall of exhaustion. By the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.

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