Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

China: at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

Ma and Lao, scions of reactionary families, are sent to the remote Phoenix Mountains for re-education. The commune leader burns Lao's cookbook ("Revolutionary peasants will never be corrupted by a filthy bourgeois chicken") and is only narrowly prevented from destroying Ma's violin when some quick thinking justifies a Mozart sonata as a "mountain song", entitled "Mozart Is Thinking Of Chairman Mao."

Ma and Lao find a welcome distraction from their backbreaking toil in the shape of the Little Seamstress, granddaughter of the local tailor.

As they realise the ignorance of the villagers to the outside world - life in the mountains has been governed by the rise and fall of the sun and the introduction of an alarm clock marks a fundamental change in their relationship with the lebenswelt - Ma and Lao take it upon themselves to re-educate them, or, at least, the Little Seamstress. They steal a case of banned books from a fellow reactionary, the now re-educated Four Eyes, and set to work on seducing the Little Seamstress, body and mind.

Adapting his own autobiographical novel, director Dai Sijie's intimacy with his subject allows for a remarkably assured mise-en-scene, using the natural and human environments of the mountain commune to good effect, and eliciting confident performances from the cast.

While somewhat episodic in structure and perhaps over-reliant on sequences of Ma and Lao reading Balzac, Flaubert and the rest, which may not convey all the subtleties found on the page, Sijie demonstrates a keen awareness of the affordances of his new medium. The score, with its register shifts between Chinese, Western and hybrid pieces at key (counter)points, is beautifully expressive.

Only the final shot, an intrusive fantasy sequence, reuniting the three leads, 25 years on, jars. There are some films and some subjects for which CGI is out of place.

Taken as a whole, Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress is an effective, enjoyable film and an interesting argument for the Open Society.