Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress 2002

     The setting of this film is China of 1971 and it is based on a novel by Dai Siji and Ina Rike.  The Cultural Revolution is still holding a strong grip on China.  Luo and Ma are two university students.  They are sent to a mountain mining village as part of their reeducation duty.  They are required to purge themselves of their classical western oriented education.  Their work in the village is backbreaking and they are very surprised by the ignorance of the villagers?  The two young men find that music and the beautiful young local women are the only pleasant things in their lives.  Otherwise, they consider their existence to be a miserable life.  They steal a secret cache of forbidden classic western literature from a departing student.  They determine to woo one of the young women and teach her from the books. 

     This film has a noble purpose but it fails to fulfill its promise?  The film moves 20 years into the future for the epilogue.  The biggest gift they bestow on the little seamstress is teaching her to read!!  The Cultural Revolution was launched in 1966 by Chairman Mao.  This Revolution had no lightness to its movement but all Chinese people are not unschooled rubes.  Chairman Mao dispenced wisdom through his Little Red Book.  The Red Guards killed many people, others were imprisoned and much of Chinese cultural heritage was destroyed. 3 1/2* (I liked this movie)

110 min, Bio directed by Sijie Dai with Xun Zhou, Kun Chen, Ye Liu, Shuangbao Wang, Zhijun Cong, Hongwei Wang, Xiong Xiao, Zuohui Tang, Wei Ghen, Tianlu Chen, Qing-yun Fan, Jie Min, He Zhang, Yukun Xu.

Note:  Imdb 7.2 out of 10, 77% critic 83% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert 2 ½*, Metacritic 65 out of 100 with 22 critics 6.6 out of 10 with 12 reviews, Amazon 4.5* out of 5* with 51 reviews.  The book has a rating of 3.64* out of 5* with 47,896 rations on goodreads.com.

Special Note:  Nonore de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright.  He lived between 20 May 1799 to 18 August 1850 in France.  Filmed in Fenghuan, Zhaniajie Mountains, Hunan and Shanghai, China plus Paris, France.  Filming was allowed in China after seven months of negotiations with the authorities.  Any projection on Chinese territory was banned.