As a kid, when I saw mynahs in the courtyard, I would think : “Japanese fighters” because of the yellow spot under their wings. I was fascinated by World War 2 fighters ( still am, actually), would avidly watch “Black Sheep Squadron”, the series about the gung-ho fighter pilots in the Pacific War, preciously kept a model of an F4 Corsair someone had given me to get cozy with me because of one of my sisters ( later on, when he became too insistent, she sent me to talk tough at him, which I did, but I kept the Corsair). I was entranced by the grainy footage of World War 2 dogfights, the great loops, the strings of bullets spewing from the planes towards a black dot between the clouds. When Lucifer raised the revolt against God, I’d like to think that his and St Michael’s host had enough good taste to fight it out in this manner, in thick leather jackets, aboard Spitfires, Messerschmidts, Mustangs, Hurricanes and Zeros.

In 1987, when I saw extracts of Spielberg’s up-and-coming film “Empire of the Sun”, I think I never wanted more to see a film in my life: that little boy who was climbing in the cockpit of the wreck of a fighter, and shooting imaginary bullets at a toy glider, that was me. I felt almost exposed : how come someone from America had made a film which stuck so closely to my childhood fantasies ?

Then I saw it, with what would nowadays pass for primitive technology, a pirate VHS copy with blurred outlines, and no French dubbing, which meant I only understood about half of what was being said, despite the rewinds. More than the copy, it was my own immaturity at sixteen which prevented me from understanding all of it. But what I did grasp, sank down in my mind like a Spanish galleon full of gold doublons. The doctor shaking Jim by the shoulders, as he shouts rapturously “P 51 Mustang ! Cadillac of the Skies ! Mustangs” and telling him: “Try not to think so much ! Try not to THINK so much !” He was talking to me, who thought too much, to the point where life was passing by me.

That moment where Jim’s mother recognises him, but he himself has grown thinner, harder and his eyes are no longer those of a child: was that what growing up meant ? I asked myself. Did one have to suffer so much to become a man ? In that case, would I ever be one, or would I remain the boy who cycled around in the empty house, at the beginning of the film ?

Empire of the Sun was not considered a Great Film, so by snobbery I never talked about it, and later on I would rather mention Lawrence of Arabia or the Godfather as my favourites. In any case, how was I to explain that it was my favourite film because, as a little boy, I had liked fighter planes , or because it came to me at the exact point in my adolescence when I needed it most? Later on, I realised that one can have a formal admiration for some films, and a more intimate relationship with others. I never forgot that movie, it was “mine”.

And still is, I can say, after watching it again for the first time after twenty years. Maybe it never left me – a few months ago I wrote a bildungsroman in which, at one point, a boy wanders in a maze-like world, like Jim running about in the refugee camp. But JG Ballard’s vision ( the novelist on whose work the film is based) is far darker than my innocent fantasies. “Empire of the Sun” is a nightmare version of “Kim”, Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece.

It is a Kim in which, instead of India at peace, we have China at war. Instead of the gruff but friendly bazaar woman who gives Kim a succulent rice and curry dish at the beginning of the story, we have an angry, exhausted Chinese woman cook in a prisoner camp, who says to her colleague “Don’t you want to go home ? I want to. They [ the prisoners] have something to eat. We have nothing to eat at my place”. And when Jim (Christian Bale) comes to ask for a second potato, having lost the first, she throws boiling water at his face in a fit of rage. Instead of an adorable Lama and a charmingly devious Mahbub Ali as father figures, we have the far more sordid, ambiguous figure of Bailey ( John Malkovitch), who sends Jim crawling into the marsh at the north of the camp, officially to set up a pheasant trap, but in fact because he wants to see whether the marsh has land mines.

In both “Kim” and “Empire of the Sun”, the idealism and adventurousness of little boys is used by adults for their own means: Kim by the English, Jim by Bailey, the Japanese boy by his country’s Air Force, which trains him to become a kamikaze. Kim becomes a secret agent in the Great Game, but Kipling , who was the British Empire’s official bard, presents the whole affair as a funny and wholesome romp in the mountains, the kind of adventure the Famous Five run into. In Kim, the slightly sinister figure of Lurgan Sahib is counterweighted by the boundless love and idealism of the Lama. But the Orient of “Empire of the Sun” is a far too devastated place to be able to produce such a benevolent figure. With its best effort, it can only produce, as a distorted reflection of Kim’s lama, the Chinese beggar at the beginning of the film, whom Jim looks at from his car: the kind, learned monk has been reduced to the filthy beggar which the Anglican Army chaplain thought him to be. And the lama’s glorious Temple of the Tirthankars in Benares, in which he would rest from his various travels around India has shrunk to the forlorn pagoda which overlooks the refugee camp, a sad reminder that the characters are in Suzhou, probably China’s most beautiful city. Kim’s happy travels along the Great Trunk Road of Northern India where his eager eye notes the gaily attired travellers, and he revels in the smell of cooking food at the end of the day are mirrored, in a horrible manner, by Jim’s deathly walk , along with the other refugees, at the end of the movie along the roads of a ghostly China. Instead of the talkative, generous Hill Queen who wants more grandsons, Kim has as traveling companion a silent, dying woman.

While everything that was good and beautiful in Kim gets shriveled to a deathly mask, the only figure who grows to ominous proportions is that of Lurgan Sahib, Kim’s mentor in the dark arts of spying. Kipling did not fully develop that character, because that was opening doors to stranger rooms than this overall happy novel needed. Bailey on the other hand has full control over Jim – he can even take him to be sold to some old Chinese gangster, and when that does not work, Jim will still run away behind him, asking : “Why don’t they want to buy me ?” and then offer the furniture of his house, just to be kept by his master. But even Bailey’s empire is sordidly small : instead of the Tibetan death masks and “sick” gems of Lurgan's shop, he only has a bar of soap and a Time Life magazine. And he gets a vicious beating for that soap. He too, is in an Orient gone hellishly bad.

Amazingly, the only character who does not change much in the two stories, is Kim/Jim. Kim is an arguably far more adept little boy than the scared, spoiled little Jim, but both retain the same vivacity, and the same doubts about their identity as they grow up. Sometimes Kim would squat in a corner and keep asking himself: “I am Kim, I am Kim, but who is Kim?” Jim has never seen England, and tells his father he wants to become a pilot in the Japanese Air Force. Bored by the sadness of the English camp, he dreams of joining the livelier American camp. Both are Little Friends of all the World, good at kowtowing in front of a brutal Japanese sergeant, and at avoiding the traps set by a Pashtun horse trader in the course of a conversation. Boys will be boys…

Kim’s last pages feel like the sad, reluctant ending of a beautiful game, but the novel has to end at that point for the character and story have stretched themselves to the limit. There is only so much goodness and magic even the Orient can give. Mahbub Ali rides away to yet other schemes and gunfights. The lama is convinced he has found his river, and leads Kim by the hand to a stream, while the evening creeps in over the enchanted scene. We do not want to know what happened next – what would the Orient be, if it revealed all its secrets ?

Jim’s return to his parents is poignant, and I have the feeling that it does not take place in the “real life” of the story, but after his death, in an afterworld. While in Kim, we feel sad that the enchantment is drawing to an end, in “Empire” we cannot yet understand that the horror is over, like the survivors of an air bombing who still hear the explosions and keep looking at the clouds, certain that the bombers will return. In my memory, I always thought that the scene where a ship plows through floating coffins, to the sound of a sad choral was the ending scene of the movie, where the family leaves Shanghai. Later on I even associated it with the sadness of leaving China ( what is it about that country that makes it so attaching ? ) . In fact, it is the opening scene. I think it should have been the ending one.

I love both Jim and Kim. Like them, I do not know who I am…and I am bored by people who tell me: “You are a Hindu, remember your culture, your traditions”. I am also a Friend of the World.