Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise

Programme Notes

DIRECTED BY: Dia Sijie
STARRING: Zhou Xun, Chen Kun, Liu Ye, Wang Shuangbao
RUNNING TIME: 1 hour 50 minutes
LANGUAGE: Mandarin & French
(with English subtitles)

This is the semi-autobiographical story of the director Dia Sijie as he returns to China after some 15 years living in France. It tells of his time in a Maoist re-education village during the 1970's. It is clear that much of the harshness has given way to a more nostalgic view of his youth and a time when the mysteries of life were unfolding in unexpected ways; but the telling is never over-sentimental. It opens up a China seldom seen by Westerners and the scenery of the Sichuan region is simply wonderful. Beautifully filmed with a superb, delicate soundtrack.

The following is a review by: Philip French Sunday May 11, 2003 [Read Full Review Here]

According to Woody Allen, or at least to a pompous television personality in his Crimes and Misdemeanors: 'Comedy is tragedy plus time.' Thus the tragedy of Chairman Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late Sixties and early Seventies has now become the setting for the romantic, gently satirical movie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. It's a Franco-Chinese co-production directed by Dai Sijie and based on his semi-autobiographical novel that has been published almost everywhere except in his native China.

The movie takes place between 1971 and 1974, after years of violence have given way to a more benign phase of the Cultural Revolution, and it centres on two 18-year-old boys, Ma and Luo. One is the son of a scientist, the other of a dental surgeon who once gave a filling to that running dog of capitalism, Chiang Kai-shek. The bourgeois sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, who are sent to Sichuan province in the far west of China to be re-educated in a peasant community.

This remote area of thickly wooded mountains, precipitous ravines and waterfalls is breathtakingly beautiful, and the chief influence of the modern world on its peasants has come in the form of a crude, reductive, intolerant communism. At their first meeting with the villagers, the boys are threatened and humiliated by the illiterate local headman.

In a scene both frightening and very funny, the chief makes them read from a cookery book they've brought and then destroys it because they must forget about sophisticated bourgeois food and eat local peasant fare. Fortunately, Ma's violin is spared. The locals have never seen such an instrument before and they're entranced when he plays a sonata that he claims is called 'Mozart thinking of Chairman Mao'.

The boys join the peasants in their unceasing work, carrying buckets of human excrement on their backs to the fields, bending double to labour in toxic mines. Their lives are changed, however, when they spy on a party of lovely young girls (Sichuan is noted, we're told, for the beauty of its maidens). These two embarrassed aliens are rumbled by the girls, who surround them like a twittering chorus from The Mikado. But instead of being turned over to the local security office to be punished for voyeurism, they become friends with the girls, and especially with the granddaughter of the elderly village tailor. They dub her the Little Seamstress as if she were the heroine of a fairy tale or a Victorian novel.

The film then centres on the love that both boys have for this beautiful, highly intelligent girl who can neither read nor write. Initiall, her inquiring mind expresses itself by taking apart their alarm clock. Then they steal a cache of banned books belonging to another exile, the bespectacled intellectual, 'Four Eyes', who has cravenly accepted every humiliation forced on him to demonstrate his contrition and reformation and win his ticket back to a university job in the big city.

The crafty boys undertake two forms of instruction, one public, the other clandestine. For the local community, they're dispatched by the village chief to see North Korean and Albanian movies at the open-air cinema in a town some distance away and retell their stories to enthral the villagers. Meanwhile, in conditions of secrecy and danger, they read Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Flaubert, Kipling, Dostoevsky and Dumas with the Little Seamstress.

The boys' own sanity is preserved by these books and she is liberated into a new world of individual identity and human possibility. On a practical level, a bootleg copy of Madame Bovary is the payment to an exiled surgeon for the performance of an illegal abortion.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress joins a tradition of films about the way books can stir the mind, create an imaginative inner life and, in sowing seeds of dissatisfaction with the readers' immediate surroundings, lead them to yearn for a world elsewhere. One thinks of Bette Davis reading T.S. Eliot out West in The Petrified Forest, and the heartbreaking Cuban film, Hello, Hemingway, in which a teenage girl in pre-Castro Havana is both transformed and shattered by reading The Old Man and the Sea.

Funny, touching, and beguiling, Dai Sijie's movie generally avoids sentimentality. It never demonises the boys' oppressors and rarely patronises them.
There are two cleverly juxtaposed scenes. In the first, Luo is given the local treatment for malaria - a dunking in freezing water followed by several hours of being beaten with a stick. In the second, the boys improvise a dentist's drill from the tailor's sewing machine to operate on the local chief's bad tooth after a 'people's dentist' has badly failed him. The film pretty well avoids demonstrating the superiority of Luo and Ma's urban sophistication at the expense of their naïve hosts.

In an elegiac coda set in the mid-Nineties, both men, now aged around 40, are enjoying considerable professional success in the post-Mao era. They look back wistfully as their sojourn in Sichuan and their relationship with the Little Seamstress as what we nowadays call a defining experience. Using a familiar but effective metaphor for a lost time and a buried past, the film presents the village of their exile as lost beneath the waters created by a huge dam on the Yangtse.

Back