Word: balzacs
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...even the bitterest of adolescences can turn sweet with the passage of time and the onslaught of nostalgia. Author and filmmaker Dai Sijie proved this when he hit literary gold in 2000 with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, his semi-autobiographical tale of discovering literature and love as a member of China's lost generation. Now Dai, who spent 1971 to 1974 exiled in a village in the mountains of Sichuan province, has directed a big-screen version of his fable, The Little Chinese Seamstress (naming it "Balzac," one suspects, wouldn't sell tickets...
...finding a gorgeous girl in a remote mountain village weren't miracle enough, the boys make an even more amazing discovery: a hidden cache of translated foreign novels by Dostoyevsky, Rousseau and, of course, Balzac. The effect the writings have on Luo and Ma is revolutionary. They undergo an intellectual and romantic awakening that stokes the inevitable sexual one. Soon the boys are smoking like Continental philosophers and making grand statements about love and human nature; in other words, they begin behaving like the college freshmen they would have been were it not for the Cultural Revolution. (Good thing they...
...Chinese author, to the point where much of the most robust "Chinese" literature is no longer even written in Chinese. In just the past decade, Chinese émigré authors who have adopted other languages have gained prominent seats in the world's literary pantheon. Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, written in French, was an immediate best-seller in France and won five prizes. Anchee Min's 1994 English-language memoir, Red Azalea, was named a "Notable Book" of the year by the New York Times, and Ji-li Jiang's Red Scarf Girl, also...
...Unknown Pleasures has this same edgy ennui in its tale of four young people; this being China, the driving is all on motorbikes. A more traditional mainland film, Dai Sajie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, brings literature to the rural masses but not much pop to the party. Outside the competition, Taiwan pursued its two-cinemas-one-country course. On the art side: Yee Chih-yen's Blue Gate Crossing, a teen courtship fable with a lovely, troubled mood. On the pop side: Chen Kuo-fu's Double Vision, an enjoyable, disposable serial-killer thriller with stars from...
...novel's catchy title, aptly describing the burden of the plot, derives from a volume of Balzac containing Ursule Mirouët wheedled out of the hidden cache of a fellow re-educatee in a nearby village. The book becomes as cherished as any work of Dickens in Waugh's A Handful of Dust. For when Luo reads and then retells the story to a dazzling but illiterate Chinese seamstress, she falls in idyllic love with both him and Balzac. Youthful passions reign, and the lovers and the narrator find themselves beset with the ultimate woe of literary teenage coupling...