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| The softly contoured young stars lie closely together with a book on this intriguing poster for Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress |
On an ordered three year re-education stay in a remote Chinese village during chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution, two young men steal literature and inaugurate a young local seamstress in its forbidden blessings.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is written and directed by great Chinese filmmaker Dai Sijie (Niu-Peng (1989)), adapting his own same-titled, semi-autobiographical 2000 novel, with Nadine Perront (The Chinese Botanist's Daughters (2006)) contributing writing.
Here is a gorgeously photographed (by Jean-Marie Dreujou (Wolf Totem (2015))) political romance drama with a sensually impressionistic nature. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is deeply compelling and moving, showing us new particulars of the horrors of Mao's Communist regime with great authority.
The film has great performances; not least Xun Zhou (The Silent War (2012)) is fabulous. The score by Pujian Wang is beautiful. The protagonist's swimming around in the ending doesn't come off entirely natural.
But the Chinese government's flooding of the paradisiacal area shown in the film is as unbelievable as it is unbearable. It concludes a film that is rare in its successful mix of being funny, intelligent, deep and extremely poignant.
Sijie gives a 12-minute interview in French in this video
Cost: Unknown
Box office: 5.2 mil. $
= Uncertain
[Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress premiered 16 May (Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard section) and runs 111 minutes. 11 production companies and governmental support bodies were involved with financing and making the film. Shooting took place from ? - May 2001 in Paris, France and in China, including Shanghai. The necessary permission to film in China took 7 months to procure and only came with the simultaneous understanding that the film would be banned from getting screened in China. The film did not get a general release in the US until 2005, and only in New York: It opened #67 to a 16k $ first weekend in 1 theater, peaking at #49 and in 22 theaters (different weeks), grossing 666k $ (12.8 % of the total gross). The film's 3 biggest markets were Germany with 1.1 mil. $ (21.2 %), North America and France with 662k $ (12.7 %). The film was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a National Board of Review award, among other honors. Roger Ebert gave the film a 2.5/4 star review, translating to two notches lower than this one. Sijie returned with The Chinese Botanist's Daughters (2006). Zhou returned in Where Have All the Flowers Gone/Na shi hua kai (2002). Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is certified fresh at 77 % with a 6.7/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
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