REVIEW
BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS
Starring Xun Zhou, Kun Chen and Ye Liu
Co-written and directed by Sijie Dai
Opens Friday, April 18
Plaza Theatre
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is an idyllic movie, which is odd considering that it’s about life at a Cultural Revolution re-education camp in early 1970s China. But if you’re 19-year-old Ma (Ye Liu) or Luo (Kun Chen), you couldn’t end up in a more gorgeous isolated mountaintop village (filled with cute girls) to get the bourgeois intellectualism worked out of you.
Yes, Ma and Luo are here to work, and it’s pretty nasty work – clinking through claustrophobic coal mines or carrying sloshy buckets of liquid shit up hundreds of steps to fertilize the crops.
But overall, it’s a pretty benign picture of the Cultural Revolution. We see the head of the village burning some cookbooks on the grounds that proletarian peanuts shouldn’t mix with bourgeois chicken – and, of course, literature is banned. But Ma and Luo seem game enough to go accept their situation, particularly when they meet the precious Little Seamstress (Xun Zhou), the cute daughter of the Old Tailor (Zhijun Cong).
As it turns out, uneducated village communists are no match for wily bourgeois sneakiness. The guys nick some four-eyed geek’s suitcase full of forbidden books – and this is where the title’s Balzac reference comes in.
Not that Balzac is presented as all that incredibly powerful and revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary, I suppose). Mostly Ma and Luo use it to impress Little Seamstress with Balzac-isms like "a woman’s beauty is a priceless treasure."
In keeping with this sentimentality, the movie has the lazy feel of a summer on the farm: most of the scenes seem to be Ma, Luo and Little Seamstress hanging out reading literature or playing the violin. It’s all very light and relaxed. There is a romantic triangle, but desire is mostly left unspoken.
The most disturbing part of the whole film is when Ma returns to the village years later, mere months before it is to vanish into the reservoir of the new mega-gigantic Yangtze Dam. After the soft teenage idyll of Ma’s teen experiences, it’s hard to imagine those little cabins and carved stone steps disappearing forever. But everybody gets older, and countries get older, too – the film makes its point gently, sweetly.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a different kind of teen movie than we usually see around here, but is worth a look. |
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