"Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress"

Walt is a big movie fan, but subscribes to the belief that they don't make movies like they used to. At least Hollywood doesn't. If Avatar is the best available example of a good movie (defined as one with a good plot, good script, good acting and good cinematography) then I'm C.B. DeMille!

Now that I've got that off my chest, let me get to a movie review. Knowing that I don't get out much, Agent 78 occasionally sends me a DVD from her country on the other side of the world. The latest to arrive is Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (巴尔扎克与小裁缝)

Released in 2005, it won a Golden Globe as Best Foreign Picture, but never made much of a splash otherwise. Being in the Sichuan dialect of Chinese probably didn't help, despite the accurate and grammatical English subtitles.

The movie was directed by Dai Sijie, who wrote the semi-autobiographical novel on which it's based. It stars Zhou Xun, Chen Kun and Liu Ye. These aren't household names, even in China, just three young actors who turn in totally credible performances as two young Chinese boys of bourgeois backgrounds and a peasant girl, at the height of the Cultural Revolution.

Sent to a remote Sichuan village for "re-education", the boys fall in love (each in his own way) with the granddaughter of an old tailor. The three find comfort and enlightenment in a stolen collection of classic Western novels, banned by the communists, which they read to each other in a hidden "book grotto".

Among their favourite authors were Dumas, Flaubert and especially Balzac. The girl, thirsting for knowledge of the world outside, learns first to read, and then to think about what her grandfather calls dangerous ideas that have no place in China in these dark times.

Eventually, one of the boys, Luo, and the seamstress become lovers, but their romance comes to an abrupt end when he is recalled to his home in the big city and she finds herself pregnant. Changed by her "sentimental education," the Little Seamstress ultimately finds the courage to leave her village for wider horizons.

It's a poignant tale, and the movie is a small and unpretentious gem, well worth hunting up in your library or on the Internet.

Footnote: The movie's conclusion makes a powerful visual statement about the Three Gorges dam, which flooded and obliterated some of China's most beautiful scenery along with hundreds of villages like that of the Little Seamstress.