nwasianweekly.com
Oct. 1, 2005

(Photo provided by Empire Pictures)
In “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” two men try to enlighten a naïve 17-year-old peasant (Xun Zhou) by reading her masterpieces of French literature.

"Balzac" offers an escape from reality

By N.P. Thompson
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

The movie version of Sijie Dai’s popular novel Balzac and  the Little Chinese Seamstress begins with great promise. A filmmaker in France since the late 1980s, Dai adapted his book into a screenplay with Nadine Perront and took the director’s reins himself.

Much like his leading men, Luo and Ma (handsomely embodied by Kun Chen and Ye Liu, respectively), Dai endured the absurdist horrors of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In the first half of the 1970s, Dai was “re-educated,” which is to say he was forced into menial labor as a means to “free” his mind and spirit from the influences of Western thought. The Revolution and its renunciation of pop music were the subject of Dai’s first film, 1989’s “China, My Sorrow.” In “Balzac,” masterpieces of French literature (banned, of course) are read, savored in secret, by a pair of young bibliophiles to a naïve 17-year-old peasant girl, whom they wish to “cure” of her ignorance.

In the early scenes, realism dominates.

The two bourgeois young men, Luo, son of a prominent dentist, and Ma, an accomplished musician, ascend Phoenix Mountain to meet the village chief (played with a dash of sadistic relish by Shuangbao Wang) in charge of eradicating their “reactionary” upbringing. The chief, a good Maoist, finds a book among the contents of Ma’s suitcase and demands to be told what it’s about. Irony of ironies, the interrogator cannot read.

The villagers gathered inside the chief’s pagoda manhandle Ma’s violin; they try to burn it, thinking the European instrument a toy. Ma then plays a movement from a Mozart sonata, and the skeptical peasants are transfixed by the sound. Outside the pagoda, listeners hang motionless in window and doorframes as the harmonics of Ma’s bowing sustain them in a still silence. In a spectacular shot, the camera pulls back from this isolated dwelling to reveal the verdant mountain paradise that surrounds it, where greenery adorns rocks that extend upward into pale, mist-shrouded skies, high above a wide expanse of the Yangtze River. It’s an idealized image of nature, and this hallowed range seems as if it would be the last place for a hard labor camp, a prison essentially, where the two young men soon haul slop buckets of human waste, strapped to their backs, up rocky passages to fertilize the soil.

(Viewers with sensitive stomachs: Take heed that the director spares us nothing in graphic footage of slop tubs sloshing over.)

Too soon, however, Dai forsakes realism. He dovetails into melodrama and tends toward crowd-pleasing, soap-operatic predictability before a final fantasy sequence in which sentimentality floods the film not just figuratively, but literally. He also experiments with slapstick, in a scene where Luo, Ma and the Seamstress rig a sewing machine as an aid in amateur dentistry, but the tone is too out-of-step with what’s come prior (the hardships of working in mine shafts) to register as amusing.

While the male roles are well cast, Xun Zhou as the Seamstress projects blankness rather than innocence. Luo’s smitten with her, but why? Chen and Liu are strong enough presences to compensate, and the movie’s pungent nostalgia for the days of one’s youth lingers even as the narrative enjambments of flash-forwards and flashbacks collapse.

“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” opens Sept. 30 at the Harvard Exit Theatre, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle. For tickets or showtimes, call 206-781-5755.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at scpnwan@nwlink.com.

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