Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress
Screening: 4 October 2004
France/China 2002
Directed by Dai Sijie
Leading players ~ Xun Zhou, Kun Chen, Ye Lui.
111 minutes (subtitles)
Synopsis
When bourgeois university students Ma (Ye Lui) and Luo (Kun Chen) are sent to the Phoenix Mountains for re-education during the height of the Cultural Revolution, they encounter a world of suspicion, ignorance and petty rivalry. Even their violin comes under the glare of local hardliners until the boys convince them that Mozart was thinking of Chairman Mao when he wrote his sonatas.But after labouring in the fields for months, Ma and Luo uncover a hidden store of foreign literature and decide to undertake some re-education of their own. They read the novels of Balzac, Flaubert and Gogol, to the beautiful, knowledge-hungry local seamstress (Xun Zhou) whom they are both in love with in an attempt to seduce her with words from a world beyond her imaginings.
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Based on his own best-selling novel of the same name, director Dai Sijie relives both the pain of stifling indoctrination during the Cultural Revolution and the uplifting joy that art can bring. With its breath-taking scenery, poetic ending and romantic heart, this is no heavy political drama but a French-influenced love story and paean to a lost world.
