Set during Mao’s 70’s cultural revolution and beautifully shot in a small Chinese moutain village, Balzac & The Little Chinese Seamstress (Balzac et la Pettite Tailleuse Chinoise) is currently one of my favorite movies. The film is about two friends who are sent to a remote rural mountain village as part of a government program to re-educate sons of bourgeois reactionary parents. There, as part of the ‘curriculum’, they must live with the peasants for a year or so, till the soil with them, chip through the mines, immerse themselves with the plight of the workers, and basically erase all traces of Western or reactionary culture in them. They react with discreet resistance, one of them gets to keep his violin and continues playing Mozart and Beethoven. They continue reading European books. Then things get more complicated when they both fall in love with the local tailor’s granddaughter, to whom they eventually impart their ‘reactionary’ ideas and inspire to think of reaching places beyond the confines of her mountain village.

The film may come of as dull to some, unoriginal with its love triangle element, and un-Chinese with its musical score largely being of Mozart’s composition. I don’t like explaining why I like some movies (like this) despite their being critiqued negatively by some ‘expert’ film critics. For me the film was simply beautiful. The movie’s setting was breathtaking, the cinematography was beautiful, the music was expressive, and the actors were effective, the story was profound. I like it.

My rating: 9/10

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Movie Babble . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.