Sijie Dai's (2002) adaptation of his (2000) international best-selling autobiographical novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress makes the locale in which Dai was sent down from the provincial capital of Chengdu to be "re-educated" during the Great Proletarian Culture Revolution very vivid. Dai's book makes clearer that his education, which had only extended through a ninth year had already been usurped by the Culture Revolution, in that his middle school years were entirely focused on chanting Mao's Little Red Book.

Dai's incarnation in the novel has no name. In the movie, he has the patronym Ma. In the movie he and his friend from the city, the nimble-witted Luo (who keeps Ma's violin from being burned by concocting an explanation that Mozart was thinking of Chairman Mao when he wrote the sonata Ma plays) are together with the seamstress from a neighboring village quite a bit, before Luo pairs off with her (this pairing is established early in the book).

Book and movie are tributes to western classical (Viennese) music and romantic French literature. The seamstress is particularly enthralled by Balzac novels read to her (and more particularly Cousin Bette), her itinerant tailor grandfather is entranced by The Count of Monte Cristo. The boys managed to seize a cache of forbidden western books that a "rehabilitated" (through his mother's communist party connections) student had in the remote mountain village where they labored.

The three leading parts are portrayed by very attractive and soulfully-eyed young Chinese actors: Xun Zhou as the seamstress, Kun Chen as Luo, and Ye Liu as Ma (their name order is western-style). The harsh countryside is photographed beautifully by Jean Marie Dreujou. (Countryside being drowned by the Three Gorge dam project that promises to be the most ecologically disastrous single project in human history.) Pujian Wang sensitively supplemented Mozart in supplying music for the movie.

The buckets of excrement Luo and Ma trudge up steps cut in a mountainside slosh more vividly on the screen than on the page, the source of very ribald folklore is more vivid on the page. Most of the characters and incidents in the book were transferred to the screen, and an epilogue that I find perplexing added. (I can't explain what I find perplexing about it or about another incident that I turned to the book to clarify and found it not there without being guilty of plot-spoiling.)

The movie remains banned in the PRC, which is still governed by the authoritarian oligarchy that is the communist party (post-Maoist in ideology, but not in keeping its eye on holding power). Considering that the book was very popular here, I don't know why the movie took so long to be released here. It played at several American film festivals and was theatrically released in Europe three years ago. There are European DVDs of it, and I watched a Chinese VCD (with English subtitles). Like Reading Lolita in Teheran or The Dead Poet's Society, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a tribute to the literary imagination discovered and nurtured in environments hostile to any ideas other than official dogma.

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This review is a contribution to pearannoyed's t&a writeoff. I'll forebear links to my numerous reviews of movies about musicians and/or rural Chinese oppression by Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older