Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Ray Bradbury meets the Cultural Revolution in writer-director Dai Sijie's adaptation of his own novel, which—like Fahrenheit 451—dramatizes the transforming power of banned books under a totalitarian regime. The state here isn't some Orwellian construct but rather Communist China during the early 1970s, and the protagonists are the sons of reactionaries sent to a mountain village for “re-education.” Although Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu) are forced to work long hours mining and carrying heavy loads across treacherous terrain, their experiences have a distinctly idyllic side: the pair save their violin from destruction by convincing the chief that the Mozart pieces they play are songs to honor Chairman Mao; they're assigned to watch North Korean movies in town and then reenact them for the remote villagers; and one acquires celebrity status due to his skill as a dentist. Both also become infatuated with the lovely seamstress granddaughter (Xun Zhou) of the resident tailor, to whom they read western novels (like Balzac) from a cache of forbidden books retrieved from a suitcase. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress boasts attractive leads and gleefully eccentric secondary players, but its transformation of brutal Maoist policy into a background for the triumph of young love and the exaltation of romantic literature will seem jarring to some viewers. Optional. (F. Swietek)