Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

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Topic: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001

posted 09-09-2005 10:19 PM

This Chinese film with French distribution and narration and English sub-titles, concerns the lives of two city-bred students sent to a remote peasant mountain village during Mao's Cultural Revolution, 1971-1974, for Comunist "re-education."

From bourgeois-intellectual backgrounds, they are humiliated by the village chief and the illiterate peasants, forced to perform back-breaking labor in the fields and mines. But they meet and fall in love with a sympathetic grand-daughter of a visiting tailor, whom they secretly educate using hidden French novels of Balzac, Flaubert, and Dumas.

The boys prove useful to the villagers by their talent in narrating the movies that on rare occasions are shown to limited audiences, wherein they freely embellish the scripts with their own romantic variations, to the delight of the villagers who have been permitted only Communist propaganda before.

The exquisitely photographed film is highly poetic, and has
moods of longing for family, love, and the refinement of a more
cultured way of life. There is political humor, sadness, and abrupt cultural upheavals that alter the destinies of all characters, as well as of the entire landscape.

I enjoyed this film.

Kew Gardens Cinema, Theatre I, 09/09/05, 7:30 PM with 25 adults
(Unrated), No advertising pre-show nor trailers. [Thank God!]

This was my first viewing of digital projection, and it had me wishing I could see this work on film. The image was letter-boxed, without masking, and much of the screen area was unused.
The beautifully composed images were lacking in sharpness and weak in color saturation and contrast.

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Per Hauberg
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 883
From: Malling, Denmark
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 09-12-2005 05:28 PM

Keep on searching, Gerard

It's one of the most beautiful films, I 've ever seen. I ran it last winter (without anyone noticing it !) - I think, we counted less than 20 people in all through that week. A near-mint 35mm scope srd print. -Just one to serve all Denmark - and enough it is, I'm afraid. Other than english soundtracks (and danish, of course) are often very difficult "to sell" to the danes. Hitler and his Untergang an exception, though !

Per

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Michael Schaffer
"Where is the
Boardwalk Hotel?"

Posts: 4143
From: Boston, MA
Registered: Apr 2002

posted 09-13-2005 02:16 AM

That sounds like about at least 800 "art" movies I have seen in Europe. The kind which would be funded by public TV stations and endowments. They all seem to based on the same blueprint. Then intellectual people in our rich Western countries can sit there and be moved by the beautifully photographed fate of less fortunate people.

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