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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 22 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 7 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Foreign | Romance
Written by:
Sijie Dai (also novel)
Nadine Perront
Directed by: Sijie Dai
Release Date:
Theatrical: July 29, 2005
DVD: December 27, 2005
Running Time: 111 minutes, Color
Origin: France / China
Language(s): Mandarin / French (with English subtitles)
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Xun Zhou, Kun Chen, Ye Liu, Shuangbao Wang, Zhijun Cong, and Hong Wei Wang
Based on the international best-seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is set in the early 1970's during the later stages of China's "Cultural Revolution," as two city-bred teenage best friends, Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), are sent to a backward mountainous region for Maoist re-education. (Empire Pictures)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
San Francisco Chronicle Jonathan Curiel
Sweet, funny, sad and profound -- the sort of film that becomes more remarkable when you realize it's based on someone's real life.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
If the movie is straightforward and predictable in its attitude, it also exudes a sort of documentary lyricism.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.
Read Full Review >New York Post V.A. Musetto
A meditation on literature, love and remembrance that is able to find humor and hope in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jami Bernard
It's a fanciful tale, but the message is sweet - that the higher arts speak a universal language that transcends politics and ignorance.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.
Read Full Review >Variety David Stratton
A visually lush and very Westernized vision of life in a remote Chinese village in the early 1970s.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ed Park
Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Artfully designed to appeal to lovers of romance and books, but by the end of the film I was not convinced it knew much about either.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Teresa Wiltz
Sure, Balzac meanders at too leisurely a pace. But the actors are charming; the story sweet
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Patrick Z. McGavin
The ethereal private moments and inspired passages are beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou, but Dai never quite organizes the material dramatically, and the tone is too often jagged and disruptive.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
Sijie mostly adapts his own work dryly and literally—the footage of the Chinese mountainside is breathtaking, but it's the only thing in the film with much depth.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Melissa Levine
The film is beautifully shot and well-acted, but, like the book, it never achieves anything like the import of the stories that inspired it. Balzac is even a little dull, especially toward the end.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman
Cute and toothless as a kitten, Seamstress doesn't inspire the same kind of fervent devotion its principals feel when confronted with art, but it does make a pleasant enough diversion.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Demonstrating just how different literature and filmmaking can be, filmmaker-turned-writer-turned filmmaker Dai Sijie botches an adaptation of his own best-selling short novel.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.4 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Julien K. gave it a9:
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 synchronisation 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 singersduring reharsals 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 depicting moments of painful separation. Who else can reproduce so vividly on the screen with such poetic toutch today? Julien Kujo, Palo Alto, California.
Chad S. gave it a7:
Rather than just watch two boys read from Balzac's "Cousin Bette", a more interesting strategy might've been to show us how two Chinese provincials would visualize period piece-France. We never really get a sense that these boys were transformed by an infusion of otherworldly words. With the tailor, we do. The way literature inspires him is when the film truly comes alive. For Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), we're absolutely sure that they love the Little Chinese Seamstress (Xun Chou), but as for Balzac, because the filmmaker inadequately shows us their passion for literature, they come off as poseurs who use the books as a tool of seduction. In the Dai Siije novel, you don't think about "Jules and Jim" in the sticks.
Myron M. gave it a10:
Beautiful story, beautiful scenery, beautiful girls, what more could an old guy want. Makes me want to visit China.
Richard F. gave it a9:
Powerful setting, both emotionally and physically . . . charming cast . . . familiar truth (cf. Educating Rita, e.g.): art can change a person utterly, and not always without cost.
m wench gave it a9:
A lovely story, unusual, beautiful to watch, especially the closing frames. A lucid glance at politically misguided philosophy resulting in pointless circumstances. In the end all beings revert to expected human conduct and seem much the nobler for it. Makes me want to crack open a few classics given the inspiration they provide to the characters.
