Word: seamstresses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Film: Little Chinese Seamstress...
...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 didn't come across any works by Schopenhauer.) Luo and his seamstress accelerate from a shy, teenage crush to a sensual coupling ripped from the pages of Flaubert. Luo even uses the novels to tutor her, inadvertently opening the innocent girl's eyes to the possibility of a life outside her village?one that doesn't necessarily include the boys...
...Because Dai uses Ma's voice-over narration sparingly and because the act of reading is tough to dramatize, his film loses some of the novel's eloquent and original meditations on the power of books. The Little Chinese Seamstress too often falls into the well-worn treads of a traditional coming-of-age tale. It doesn't help that Dai seems to forget that the boys are living in the middle of the Cultural Revolution; with its postcard-perfect vistas and the endless free time the trio enjoys, life in Phoenix on the Sky seems less re-education camp...
...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 of youth...
...Film: Little Chinese Seamstress...