Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Ketrivie
It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
barlenon
"Balzac and the little seamstress" is French made film which portrays the profound impact that illicit French literature has on a peasant Chinese village during the cultural revolution. Outsiders, two city boys sent from the big city for re-education, breezily deal with the hardship of peasant life and the disapproval of their bourgeois ways. Fortunately for them, they are saved by their discovery of the presence of a stash of cultured (mostly French) foreign literature. They then begin their own re-education project in an effort to bring civilization to object of their love, the cute little seamstress. Unfortunately the film becomes an unconvincing lesson in the enlightening impact of European and particularly French culture when presented to rural Sichuan peasants. The pretensions of this concept are bad enough. But even this half-baked concept becomes more laughable the hands of this ham-fisted director. Attempts at comedy fall flat and the character relationships are empty. Without this there is little of value in such a film except for the undeniably beautiful setting.
zachgeorgenick
While I saw the movie, I also read the book. I have learned that this is an extremely bad idea because the movie does not follow the nook closely. It is apparent that the director, Sijie Dai, depicted the novel differently. The movie shows how life for Luo and Ma became an adventure for them since they are going to be "re-educated" as a policy that China's Communist leader wanted to implement. The theme of the movie was to show that memories from a new place will scar the person. The movie failed to depict closely to the book.Luo and ma was sent to work in the Pheonix Mountains during the Cultural Revolution in China. While they worked there as a part of their "re-education", Luo and aMa finds out about love and more about a world they never knew. Through contraband's, such as books, they motivated themselves to stay and work in the Pheonix Mountians. At the end, the memories that Luo and Ma both experienced were kept close to their heart.
Tony D'Ambra
A faithful rendering of the novel. Casting is uncanny and cinematography breathtaking. The theme is deeply mature and a bitter-sweet recollection of youth and innocence in a remote rural village in China, during the Red Guard terror when the children of "bourgeois revisionists" are sent to the country-side for "re-education" through manual labor.But politics is in the background, and the story focuses on the friendship between two teenage boys and their love for the daughter of the village tailor, and the power of story-telling in shaping aspirations and mutual understanding. Even minor characters are profoundly developed and a gentle humor pervades the screen.The tacked-on ending not in the book mars an otherwise perfect reflection on the novel's story and the principal players.
Hunky Stud
overall, this is a good movie. the scenery is very nice to look at, so out of this world. I found two mistakes. 1. both them speak with dialects. Then when one of the guy were talking to a local folksong singer, all of sudden, he started to talk in perfect mandarin which doesn't make sense. 2. At the end of the movie, the guy actually jumped into the water, and searched for the dead person's name among all those paper boats which seem to be fake. He could have just asked people about it.The markup artists are great. They were able to change those two young men into middle age men without any obvious fake decorations.I didn't think that it was necessary for those two characters to speak heavy dialects at all. If they are from the city, they should know how to speak the national language - Mandarin. It is so hard to understand those people, I had to read the English subtitles. I also like the ending which seems like a copy from Titanic. It was well done.That period of time was a tragic time. This movie could have a little more tear jerking moment, etc. It doesn't have any. And it also did not show us any dark side of the communist party, the craziness people get into.
