Word: luo
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...Though its pace drags and its tone is too unvarying, the movie shares the sweet melancholy of the novel. Both versions evoke a wistful longing for the irretrievable drama of youth. Teenage pals Ma (Liu Ye) and Luo (Chen Kun), inheritors of the bourgeois crimes of their doctor parents, are sent for re-education to the primitive if not remarkably picturesque mountain village of Phoenix on the Sky. The work is tough and the conditions harsh. Even worse, all books are banned?except little red ones. Western music is equally verboten as Ma, the film's violin-playing narrator, discovers...
...often does, in the form of a beautiful girl: a local seamstress, played by rising mainland starlet Zhou Xun. Zhou lights up the screen like a fistful of fireworks. The boys don't have a chance against her charm, by turns girlish and devilish. The darkly handsome Luo, ever the leader, stakes his claim first, his brooding eyes tracing Zhou with a hunger neither quite comprehends at first. Introverted Ma plays the third wheel but struggles to suppress his growing feelings for the seamstress...
...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...
...less re-education camp than Mao's Outward Bound. But Seamstress, which earned a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign-language film, achieves moments of quiet beauty as well. Ma sheds confused tears at the mention of Balzac's Chinese translator, punished as a reactionary like Ma's father; Luo reads Ursule Mirouet out loud as if it were freshly written, while the seamstress lies in his lap and dreams of a new world...
...literally drowns the film in nostalgia during its unfortunate coda, turning the movie into a Chinese version of The Big Chill. Luo and Ma, two decades older, watch a video Ma has shot of the village that was their prison, now fated to be flooded because of the Three Gorges Dam. The video focuses on the little Chinese seamstress's room, long empty, long fled. Their tears fall quick, tears for that small gift of time when joy and pain were so closely bound that neither could be felt without the other. Which is, of course, the very definition...