Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

2002 "A tailor-made love story."
7.2| 1h56m| en
Details

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor's beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

Director

Producted By

Les Films de la Suane

AD
AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

All Prime Video Movies and TV Shows. Cancel anytime. Watch Now

Trailers & Clips

Reviews

Cebalord Very best movie i ever watch
StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.
jkujo An invaluably sad but exceptionally beautiful work of art realistically depicting instability and mutability of all things in modern life. It's inevitably fluid like nature of human evolution between one époque to another. I can feel ethereal touch of Author's filial love to his mother country china. It is easy to see that the Author was torn between his deep seated love for China and Ambition of prosperity on his chosen land (France) at the moment of his life time decision making. This is something that not many understand unless you are forced to leave from your homeland and love ones for a cause. I have left Japan , Kyoto and a noble born beloved fiancé along with almost all things I perceived exquisite at that time for an ambitious cause.Augmented by an outstanding soundtracks with his genius touch in a perfect synchronization with emotion portrayed in screenplay. Since I have played harpsichord continuo part for Haendel's tragic opera such as Alcina, Otone and Radamisto for student soprano singers during rehearsals in the past, I can readily feel Author's masterful quality of refined artistic mind in every scene.This is a second film that I bought for my collection of Dai Sijie's works. I must admit that he is a genius of screenplay when it comes to depicting moments of painful separation. Who else can reproduce so vividly on the screen with such poetic touch today? Julien Kujo, Palo Alto, California
crossbow0106 This story is about a group of people during Chairman Mao's regime who are re-educated, a movement in which young people from the city were shipped off to rural areas of China to work on farms & mines. The work is hard and dirty. The two young men Luo and Ma become acquainted with the local girls, especially the Little Seamstress (her actual name is not given), who lives with her grandfather. They befriend her and oner of them falls in love with her and why not, she's very pretty and sweet. The two young men steal foreign books from someone named "Four Eyes" and they try to teach the little seamstress to read. The grandfather fears this will change her forever and doesn't want it. The film is gripping throughout, the story is very good and probably true to life. The acting is uniformly good, the cinematography is good and the atmospheric aura around this film is compelling. I found this film very watchable and if you're interested in the theme I definitely recommend it. It held my interest throughout.
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.
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.