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SEPTEMBER 2005

Movie Review
A Well-Tailored Tale: Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress

By Jan Aaron

That good literature has a significant impact on one’s life is certainly the view held by educators throughout the free world. So, this movie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, set during China’s repressive Cultural Revolution, makes us realize how fortunate we are to be able read books and learn from them and how books can change lives. A movie you can recommend to students, it can spark classroom discussions about how books have changed their lives.

The film, which director Dai Sijie co-adapted with Nadine Perront) from his autobiographical novel of the same name, (a good read for high school age and above) follows the story of four main characters, all involved in Mao Zedong’s reeducation program. Under his rule in the 1970’s city dwellers are forced to live in rural districts, shed their bourgeois ideas, learn to live collectively and forget about Balzac and Mozart

“To think this is the dump where we may spend the rest of our lives,” says Ma (Ye Liu), a burgeoning violinist. when he first sees the village, where no one has seen a book or clock, and work is brutal. Here with his best friend Luo (Kun Chen), who loves to read, they carrying slop in pails and work in a dilapidated coal mine. The teenage boys soon find ways to get around restrictions imposed by village chief, (Shuangbao Wang). One way is to set their alarm clock ahead by several hours so the leader thinks it’s quitting time.

When Ma plays Mozart on his violin, the chief demands to know what it is he’s playing. “Mozart’s Thinking About Chairman Mao,” he proclaims. As Ma performs, the camera sweeps upward and the music lifts everyone.

Things change when the teens meet the pretty, illiterate granddaughter of the Old Tailor in the next village, who they dub “The Little Seamstress” (Xun Zhou). She loves stories, but cannot read. Luo steals a trove of banned translated works by Dumas, Balzac, Flaubert and other decadents, and the teens read to her in secret, turning her onto to new worlds. There other subplots. Both teen boys fall in love with the Little Seamstress. In fact, the movie is about love—young love and all its complications.

Shot in the Sichuan area of China, it’s a visual treat, with panoramas, waterfalls, mists, and the lovely ceremony of little candlelit paper boats honoring dead relatives. (Not rated, 111 minutes, in Chinese with English subtitles.)#

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