Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (film)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress simplified Chinese traditional Chinese French Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse Chinoise is a 2002 FrancoChinese romance drama film with dialogue in the Sichuan dialect directed by Dai Sijie and starring Zhou Xun, Chen Kun and Liu Ye. It premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival onMay.

The film is set in a period between 1971 and 1974, during the later stage of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Two city boys in their late teenage years, Luo Min played by Chen Kun and Ma Jianling Liu Ye, are on their way to a remote village in the mountainous Sichuan province for reeducation. Upon arrival, the boys are questioned on their reactionary backgrounds by the Chief Chen Tianlu, the village leader, in the presence of the other villagers. Luos father turns out to be a dentist who had once fitted a false tooth for Chiang Kaishek, while Mas father is a doctor. The Chief also examines the boys luggage and burns a cookbook, which he claims to be bourgeois. He is about to throw Mas violin into the fire as well before he is stopped by Luo, who lies that the Mozarts Divertimento KV 334 Ma plays is a mountain song titled Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao.The two boys are allocated a house and immediately join in the labours of the locals, which include transporting buckets of human waste used for fertilizer as well as working in the coal mine. One day, a young girl, granddaughter of a tailor from the neighbouring village and known to everyone as the Little Seamstress Zhou Xun, comes by with her grandfather to listen to Ma play violin. Luo and Ma befriend the Little Seamstress and soon both fall in love with her. The girl, illiterate but hungry for knowledge, and the boys, vowing to transform her, devise a plan to steal a suitcase filled with banned translated Western novels from FourEyes Wang Hongwei, another boy undergoing reeducation in the village but bound to return to the city. Luo begins to read to the Little Seamstress every day, books including those by Stendhal, Kipling and Dostoevsky. But her favourite turns out to be Balzac. ........

Source: Wikipedia