I finally got around to watching Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress the other night. The boy has little appetite for dramas, so I had to wait until after we'd seen The Man with Two Brains and Kombi Nation (though I suspect the latter comedy was still too real-life for his tastes), before he retired to his computer games and left me to watch the movie I really wanted to watch.
Balzac is a French/Chinese collaboration, based on the novel by Dai Sijie; he also wrote the film's screenplay. It's set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and is about two young men from Chengdu who are sent to a remote village in the Phoenix Mountains for "re-education".
Their daily duties include lugging enormous lidless baskets of human excrement from the village latrine to the fields, to be used as fertiliser. They fill those baskets pretty full, and the path to the fields is more than a little steep and slippery...
They befriend, and eventually both fall in love with, a girl of the same age - a seamstress who lives with her tailor grandfather. She knows of a guy just completing his re-education who has a hidden stash of foreign (and therefore anti-revolutionary) books; the lads steal it and the books turn out to be by the likes of Balzac and Dumas. They read the books to their new friend, whose mind soon turns to curiosity about the world beyond the mountains.
Amongst the horrible bits (one of the guys gets malaria and the local cure is a good thrashing with a choice of sapplings) and sad bits (the girl gets pregant; she's under the legal age for marriage and abortion is only legal for married women so she gets an illegal one) is a bit which is both horrible and funny - the village chief has a rotten tooth and demands that one the boys, whose father is a famous dentist (albeit a counter-revolutionary one), fix his tooth. The scene in which the fledgeling dentist is trying to drill the chief's tooth, with a home-made drill powered by a sewing machine treadle, is priceless.
And best of all - unusual for a Chinese movie, Balzac doesn't have a weepy ending. After the desperate tragedies of stories like Raise the Red Lantern and Red Sorghum (you have to be in the mood for Zhang Yimou), one in which nobody dies is quite a nice change.
2 comments:
I read the book and loved it. I didn't know there was a movie.
Well there y'go. I'm tempted to get the book out to read, but at the moment I'm waist-deep in management books (none of them from the university library, thanks to the smarty-pants forward-thinking students who got there first).
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