Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

During the Cultural Revolution in China in the early 1970s, Luo, the son of Chaing Kai-shek\'s dentist, and Ma are condemned as the sons of \'reactionary intellectuals\' and are sent to a remote part of the country to learn about life from the illiterate inhabitants of a small village. Here, the young city men have to undertake exhausting manual chores, like carrying heavy, overflowing barrels of human excrement, which is used for fertilizer. They are carefully supervised by the village Head Man. But both young men fall under the spell of the beautiful grand-daughter of the local tailor - they never know her name, but she captivates them with her innocence and sensuality, and when they discover a hidden suitcase filled with banned Western books, mostly French, they charm her by reading Flaubert, Dumas and Balzac to her. This very westernized Chinese-French co-production was directed by Dai Sijie and based on his semi-autobiographical novel -like the young men in the story, Dai was forced to undergo \'re-education\' during the Cultural Revolution. It\'s a very romanticized view of this harsh period of recent Chinese history, and the casting of three beautiful young actors tends to add to the feeling of unreality. But the location camerawork, by Jean-Marie Drejou, is exceptionally beautiful, making the film very easy on the eye.