Bittersweet Teen Awakenings
Movie Review of 'Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress'
Volume 75, Number 30
| July 28 - Aug. 3,
2005FILMBALZAC
AND THE LITTLE CHINESE
SEAMSTRESSDirected by Dai Sijie
Distributed by Empire
PicturesOpens July 29 at the Paris
TheatreIn Chinese and French with
English
subtitlesLuo
DongXun Zhou, back to the camera,
stars as the Little Chinese Seamstress, seen with Luo, played by Kun Chen,
the young man who falls in love with her
at a remote Maoist reeducation
camp.Bittersweet Teen
AwakeningsNovel’s
film adaptation explores love during China’s Cultural
Revolution
By SETH
BOOKEYIt is not surprising that the
world’s most populous nation, China, an economic powerhouse with limited
Western contact, is the subject of a spate of recent films.
“Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress” blends a Western storytelling style with a look at a critical
period in the history of the Peoples’ Republic of China, the Cultural
Revolution.Adapted from the best-selling
autobiographical novel by Dai Sijie, who also directed the film,
“Balzac” recounts Sijie’s experience in a remote, rural
“re-education” during the latter days of what was termed the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. On a
national level, the purges, show trials and state-sponsored terror helped Mao
Zedong secure his position by encouraging young Red Guards to run rampant and
suppress any internal dissent. For
citizens haplessly caught up in the political intrigue, though, the consequences
were often dire, including imprisonment, or forced indoctrination and even
death. “Balzac” opens with
the arduous trek, along a steep footpath across rocky peaks, of two teenage boys
sent for “re-education” into the Chinese countryside. While the
middle-class boys, Ma (Ye Liu) and Luo (Kun Chen), the sons of doctors, toil up
a rocky hillside day after day with large buckets of liquid manure on their
backs, the head of the village (Shuangbao Wang) exhorts them with Marxist-Maoist
slogans extolling the virtues of hard work. The boys save a violin from a fire
by claiming a classical composition is “Mozart Thinking of Mao.” The
uneducated village leader is too fearful, though, to believe
them.Luo and Ma are the only literate
people in the village and several of their few possessions, such as a wind-up
alarm clock, fascinate their peasant neighbors. In time they meet “the
little Chinese seamstress” (Xun Zhou) and her grandfather, the old tailor.
As expected, both young men fall for the beautiful girl, but Ma alone gets to
consummate his feelings for her. After
they steal a cache of forbidden translated Western classics from “Four
Eyes” (Hongwei Wang), both young men, however, get to show their love for
the young beauty by teaching her to read and write
The adaptation of Sijie’s
autobiographically inspired tale succeeds in the film’s stunning visuals.
The pencil-like peaks and cavernous gorges create a visual representation of how
Luo and Ma feel cut off from their upbringing. A scene of the two spying on
girls bathing under a waterfall paints a picture evocative of Manet’s
“Luncheon on the Grass.”
Since they can read, Luo and Ma are sent
into a nearby town to watch subtitled films from Albania and North Korea,
China’s communist allies, and come back to retell the stories to the
villagers. The boys not only embellish the stories to make them more interesting
(and less political), but they help recreate the scene, scattering rice while
recalling a scene during a snowstorm. Later, the film’s one sex scene is
one of the more artful ones brought to recent
screens.Sijie, who wrote the novel in
French, tells this tale very much like the authors of the
“forbidden” books they use to educate the seamstress.
Like Flaubert’s “Sentimental
Education,” there is the nostalgic story of a love affair told with great
realism. And like any Balzac novel, most of the tale is back-story, helping
explain “the current situation.” Not only does the film look back at
the China of the 1970s, we also see Luo and Ma later on in their lives, looking
back at their time up in the hills, in love with the same girl, only voicing it
aloud to one another after it’s all over. Part of the “sentimental
education” here is that the seamstress, having seen the world beyond the
hills via literature, eventually has to go see it for herself, never to be found
again by Luo or Ma. Even more sentimentally, a construction project threatens to
destroy the gorges altogether.The great
irony of this beautifully told love story is that the book, and the movie, are
currently off-limits to the Chinese. While the film’s remote, penal
setting frames the narrative, Maoist oppression takes a back seat to the love
triangle that is at the center of “Balzac.” After a while, you do
start to wonder how Luo and Ma have all this free time to pursue the seamstress
and give her an education. When we meet Ma and Luo later on, they reminisce
about their re-education as if they were two former bunkmates at a summer camp.
Far from being traumatized, they seem to have happily moved on with their lives.
What the film does, most of all, is
glory in the ideal of love—first love, companionship, and the love of
ideas and education. “Balzac and
the Little Seamstress” proves throughout what the Chinese government is
afraid of—that ideas can change society, even if it’s one person at
a time.
Posted: Thu - July 28, 2005 at 10:22 PM
|
Quick Links
Calendar
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat
|
Categories
Archives
XML/RSS Feed
Statistics
Total entries in this blog:
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Jun 20, 2009 07:03 PM
|