In 1971, Mao's Cultural Revolution swept over China, shutting down universities and banishing "reactionary intellectuals", meaning boys and girls who had graduated from high school, to the countryside to be re-educated by the poor peasants. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, France's nominee for Best Foreign Film at this year's Golden Globe Awards, is about re-education and is based on the experience of the director Dai Sijie who spent four years of his life in a similar program.
In this French/Chinese collaboration, two teenage boys, Ma (Ye Liu), a stand-in for Sijie, and Luo (Kun Chen), are sent to live on the remote mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Sijie describes the setting in his autobiographical novel of the same name, "The Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the depths of gloomy valleys. Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city. But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me. We were assigned quarters in the very house on stilts where the village headman had inspected my violin. This building was village property, and had not been constructed with habitation in mind. Underneath, in the space between the wooden props supporting the floor, was a pigsty occupied by a large, plump sow-likewise common property. The structure itself was made of rough wooden planks, the walls were unpainted and the beams exposed; it was more like a barn for the storage of maize, rice and tools in need of repair."
In the early part of the film, the boys have to use their wits to stay one step ahead of the authorities. In one incident, when the village chief wants to confiscate their violin because he thinks it is a bourgeois toy, they save their instrument by telling him they will play a sonata called "Mozart is Thinking of Mao". In another episode, the chief burns a cookbook, the only book the boys have brought with them, because "Revolutionary peasants will never be corrupted by a filthy bourgeois chicken." Ma and Luo seek to avoid the heavy work that takes its toll by reading books and enjoying music. They steal "subversive" novels of Honore de Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Gogol from a student named Four-Eyes and read them to the granddaughter of the local tailor, known only as the Little Chinese Seamstress (Xun Zhou,). While reading, both boys fall in love with the girl, and, through Balzac, discover "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden". The unsophisticated girl is deeply affected and feels herself "carried away in a dream". Inspired by the literature, she seeks to escape from the limitations of her present life. By the time the end credits roll around, her biggest influence has been, not Chairman Mao or the Village Chief, but Balzac himself. Talk about a Cultural Revolution.
While the acting is strong, Xun Zhou looks more like a model from a Beijing studio than a naïve mountain seamstress and the boys seem more like symbols of the power of art than real people undergoing a difficult and painful experience. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress wants to tell an important story, but comes across as a bit too precious, trivializing its material in a sentimental tone poem that ultimately fails to satisfy. It may, however, succeed in stimulating a revival of Pere Goriot.
In this French/Chinese collaboration, two teenage boys, Ma (Ye Liu), a stand-in for Sijie, and Luo (Kun Chen), are sent to live on the remote mountain known as Phoenix in the Sky. Sijie describes the setting in his autobiographical novel of the same name, "The Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the depths of gloomy valleys. Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city. But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me. We were assigned quarters in the very house on stilts where the village headman had inspected my violin. This building was village property, and had not been constructed with habitation in mind. Underneath, in the space between the wooden props supporting the floor, was a pigsty occupied by a large, plump sow-likewise common property. The structure itself was made of rough wooden planks, the walls were unpainted and the beams exposed; it was more like a barn for the storage of maize, rice and tools in need of repair."
In the early part of the film, the boys have to use their wits to stay one step ahead of the authorities. In one incident, when the village chief wants to confiscate their violin because he thinks it is a bourgeois toy, they save their instrument by telling him they will play a sonata called "Mozart is Thinking of Mao". In another episode, the chief burns a cookbook, the only book the boys have brought with them, because "Revolutionary peasants will never be corrupted by a filthy bourgeois chicken." Ma and Luo seek to avoid the heavy work that takes its toll by reading books and enjoying music. They steal "subversive" novels of Honore de Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Gogol from a student named Four-Eyes and read them to the granddaughter of the local tailor, known only as the Little Chinese Seamstress (Xun Zhou,). While reading, both boys fall in love with the girl, and, through Balzac, discover "awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden". The unsophisticated girl is deeply affected and feels herself "carried away in a dream". Inspired by the literature, she seeks to escape from the limitations of her present life. By the time the end credits roll around, her biggest influence has been, not Chairman Mao or the Village Chief, but Balzac himself. Talk about a Cultural Revolution.
While the acting is strong, Xun Zhou looks more like a model from a Beijing studio than a naïve mountain seamstress and the boys seem more like symbols of the power of art than real people undergoing a difficult and painful experience. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress wants to tell an important story, but comes across as a bit too precious, trivializing its material in a sentimental tone poem that ultimately fails to satisfy. It may, however, succeed in stimulating a revival of Pere Goriot.